Lufthansa is planning to adopt dynamic award pricing within Miles & More, its loyalty program. Wednesday, the carrier confirmed that it would be moving away from a tiered system for calculating the cost of tickets purchased with frequent flyer miles and toward a new standard that prices tickets according to the retail price of the fare. Lufthansa is the first and largest major European carrier to formally adopt dynamic pricing in its loyalty program (though British Airways has hinted at its own plans). The move comes only weeks after United announced its own intent and several years after Delta, the first major carrier to experiment with the pricing, went live. Dynamic pricing is a relatively new approach to selling award seats in the airline industry. <br/>
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Air NZ is reducing flights on domestic routes and reviewing airfares as tourism slows and operating costs rise. An Air NZ spokeswoman said from July the carrier would begin making some mostly off-peak frequency reductions on its domestic trunk routes and some regional services. The result would be a reduction in domestic capacity of about 2% year-on-year, she said. Some fares were also being reviewed but there was no plan to change lead-in fares on domestic and regional services. "Given the impact of the sustained rise in the cost of jet fuel and the impact of other cost increases in areas such as airport landing fees, we are currently reviewing some fares," the spokeswoman said. Air NZ remained committed to all routes in New Zealand, she said. <br/>
SAS has called on unions and management to find new ways of dealing with conflict in the future after a costly pilot strike. The group estimates the cost to this year’s earnings of a week-long walkout by pilots at SEK650m (US$68m). Around 370,000 passengers were affected by the grounding of 4,000 flights. “I hope that when the dust settles and everybody in SAS can see the enormous impact it has on our earnings and our reputation with customers, that we realise this is not the way forward,” CE Rickard Gustafson said. The group earlier said the strike was one of the reasons that would make it challenging to achieve a profit this year. “Most of our employees are seeking some sort of job security and the only job security that is worth anything on paper is our ability to be competitive and embarking on strikes would do the opposite.” <br/>