Could axing frequent flyer points be key to helping cut New Zealand's greenhouse emissions?
Photo: 123RF
While Air New Zealand says the only hard part about airpoints rewards is deciding what to spend them on, a new UK government report suggests these shouldn't be spent on anything.
It says they should be grounded altogether in a bid to reduce carbon emissions from flying.
Such emissions from flying are estimated to make up 5.8 percent of the greenhouse gases being created by New Zealanders.
The report, which was commissioned by the UK committee on climate change, says the norm of unlimited flying needed to be challenged - and described it as a highly-polluting luxury.
Greenpeace New Zealand executive director Russell Norman said he supported a ban on frequent flyer programmes, and said finding alternatives to air travel was vital.
He said staying out of the sky was the only real way for New Zealanders to keep their aviation emissions down.
"The reality is that air travel produces a lot of emissions and I think it's incumbent on all of us to do as little of it as we possibly can."
He said it was important that New Zealanders had access to a decent rail network.
"The question you've got to ask yourself is why does it take 12 hours to go on a train from Auckland to Wellington?
"We actually need to build a fast rail network," he said.
Victoria University director of environmental studies Professor Ralph Chapman said people were becoming more cognisant of other ways to travel, and everyone needs to carefully consider when they hop on a plane.
"Well the fundamental problem is that they persuade people to fly when they might not otherwise, so in a world where we're trying to cut carbon emissions drastically to avoid catastrophic climate change, it's not cool to go flying unnecessarily.
"There's a lot of trips that people might take that they don't actually need to and those should be cut out not incentivisted, so there should be penalties working against people flying rather than rewards encouraging them to fly."
But Flight Centre managing director David Coombes didn't agreed that reward programmes prompted people to fly more.
"From our perspective frequent flyer points and programmes don't motivate travel, what they do motivate is loyalty to certain carriers."
He said work was underway to cut back on carbon emissions in the travel industry, but banning incentives like frequent flyer points wasn't the way.
"I think there are much better ways to deal with it and certainly the industry's very trained in to sustainability from airlines and also corporate in the way they develop their travel programmes."
Air New Zealand did not respond for requests to comment on this story.
