One of the best reasons to be a JetPrivilege miles collector has always been the number of partner airlines they have had where you could earn and burn miles. There have been tonnes of partners all along, although that list of JetPrivilege partner airlines been shrinking recently.

First, United exited their partnership early 2017. Then, Turkish, Lufthansa, Swiss and Austrian were on their way out of the partnership in 2017. After that, the American collaboration was also discontinued. Air Berlin self-combusted. Behind the exit of some of the partners, the reason looks slightly simple, the cooperation with Delta, which may have meant that 9W would not cooperate with other airlines which would also be operating in the India-North America/Europe markets.

So, many partners left the airline over the past one year, and this process does not seem to be slowing down anytime soon. Effective March 31, 2018, you will not be able to credit Emirates flights to JetPrivilege or use JPMiles to redeem for Emirates tickets.

JetPrivilege discontinuing ties with Alitalia

Another partner who will go away is Alitalia. Effective April 30, one will not be able to earn or burn JPMiles for Alitalia flights. If you have any trips through April 30, 2018, on Alitalia which you would like to credit to JetPrivilege, you would have six months to make a retro-credit. Award tickets on Alitalia already issued before April 30, 2018, into the future will also be valid. This is a sad turn of events for the Etihad Airways partners, given that it leaves Jet Airways to be only partners with Etihad Airways, Air Serbia, and Air Seychelles as of now. As a reminder, Alitalia recently launched a flight to India.

Earning miles on Cathay Pacific flights changed

Effective April 11, 2018, you members will not earn JPMiles on flights between India and Hong Kong which are marketed and operated by Cathay Pacific or by Cathay Dragon. Cathay Pacific flies from 6 airports around India: Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Chennai, and Bangalore.

For example, if you are traveling between Mumbai – Hong Kong or Delhi – Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific, you will not be eligible for accrual of JPMiles. You will continue to earn JPMiles on rest of the network of Cathay Pacific and Cathay Dragon. So in a BOM-HKG-SFO flight, you get miles for the HKG-SFO segment.

Bottomline

It is bad news that JetPrivilege is taking away partners left right and centre. However, some of these are perhaps sitting ducks to make the program more streamlined in the long run. I hope that here on, we only have partner additions and not deletions with JetPrivilege.

What do you think about the new changes to the JetPrivilege program?