Last night I attended the Freddie Awards, which offered a great opportunity to re-connect with fellow bloggers, industry insiders, and meet one of my heroes.
2022 Freddie Awards In New Orleans
Created in 1988 by Randy Petersen to recognize the world’s best and most innovative frequent travel programs, the awards are named in honor of airline pioneer Sir Freddie Laker, who helped to make travel available to the masses.
The 2022 event took place the World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana. The venue was beautiful with the dinner and the award ceremony taking place under a canopy of airplanes.
It was the first Freddie Awards event since 2019 and I loved meeting in-person – how nice it was reconnect with friends and acquaintances, most of whom I have not seen in the flesh since before the pandemic. Phone calls are one thing, but there is no substitute for in-person fellowship.
The master of ceremonies was a hero of mine, Scott McCartney. He wrote The Middle Seat column for the Wall Street Journal, a column I looked forward to every week for most of my adult life. McCartney was magnanimous in-person and I enjoyed a wonderful conversation with him.
A special thanks to Ed Pizzarello and Gary Leff for organizing the event and laboring so hard to make it a success. I was thankful to attend event and now recognize the winners below.
2022 Annual Freddie Awards – Winners
Congrats to the 2022 winners. There were some surprises and some familiar winners.
- Americas
- Airline
- Program of the Year — Southwest Airlines – Rapid Rewards
- Best Elite Program — American Airlines – AAdvantage
- Best Promotion — Avianca – LifeMiles – 175% Bonus on Purchased Miles
- Best Customer Service — Southwest Airlines – Rapid Rewards
- Best Redemption Ability — Air Canada – Aeroplan
- Hotel
- Program of the Year — Marriott Hotels – Marriott Bonvoy
- Best Elite Program — Marriott Hotels – Marriott Bonvoy
- Best Promotion — Caesars Entertainment – Caesars Rewards – Earn for Next Year
- Best Customer Service — Caesars Entertainment – Caesars Rewards
- Best Redemption Ability — Marriott Hotels – Marriott Bonvoy
- Credit Card
- Best Loyalty Credit Card — Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards Premier Credit Card
- Airline
- Europe & Africa
- Airline
- Program of the Year — TAP Air Portugal – Miles&Go
- Best Elite Program — TAP Air Portugal – Miles&Go
- Best Promotion — TAP Air Portugal – Miles&Go – Black Friday
- Best Customer Service — TAP Air Portugal – Miles&Go
- Best Redemption Ability — TAP Air Portugal – Miles&Go
- Hotel
- Program of the Year — Accor – ALL Accor Live Limitless
- Best Elite Program — Accor – ALL Accor Live Limitless
- Best Promotion — Marriott Hotels – Marriott Bonvoy – Better Two-gether
- Best Customer Service — Accor – ALL Accor Live Limitless
- Best Redemption Ability — Accor – ALL Accor Live Limitless
- Credit Card
- Best Affinity Credit Card — American Express – Membership Rewards
- Airline
- Middle East & Asia/Oceania
- Airline
- Program of the Year — Singapore Airlines – KrisFlyer
- Best Elite Program — Singapore Airlines – KrisFlyer
- Best Promotion — Singapore Airlines – KrisFlyer – Earn Status Credit without Flying
- Best Customer Service —Singapore Airlines – KrisFlyer
- Best Redemption Ability — Singapore Airlines – KrisFlyer
- Hotel
- Program of the Year — ITC Hotels – Club ITC
- Best Elite Program — ITC Hotels – Club ITC
- Best Promotion — ITC Hotels – Club ITC – Reduced Requalification Requirements
- Best Customer Service — Marriott Hotel – Marriott Bonvoy
- Best Redemption Ability — ITC Hotels – Club ITC
- Credit Card
- Best Affinity Credit Card — American Express Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer Credit Card
- Airline
As you can see, TAP Air Portugal, Accor, ITC Hotels and Singapore Airlines really cleaned house. Congrats to the winners, as voted by members.
CONCLUSION
Perhaps the greatest part of the Freddie Awards was simply that it took place in-person. This marked the first banquet I’ve attended in over two years and it was just fun to see so many friends and familiar faces. I’ll have more thoughts on New Orleans in a future post. It was my first stay in NOLA.
I have a ton of respect for many of the people you mention who organize the Freddies, but regarding the “surprises”, don’t you think it’s long overdue to revamp the voting process? It’s become a contest about which program has the most members and spends the time to mobilize them to vote instead of recognizing which programs have gone out of their way to create value and recognition for their customers. Now Marriott can stick banners all over the place saying they were voted Program of the Year and Best Elite Program when anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of hotel programs knows that’s a joke. There’s a reason programs here clean up instead of recognizing what’s good about each of them: most of them are the biggest and/or have done campaigns to get their members to vote.
These awards have become meaningless except for the marketing the programs get out of it. I hope you and others I respect will push for some changes.
Hahahaha, TAP winning the ‘best customer service award’ is totally hilarious. It makes Skytrax ratings look credible!
And I say this as someone who has flown multiple segments on them over the past 3-4 months and is actually pretty happy with their reliability, lounge, in-flight service etc.
How does one airline win every single award in Europe and Asia? The voting process is totally messed up it seems.
This is clearly way off. Bonvoy winning over Hyatt?? Southwest over Aeroplan??? Wow.
Absolutely right. Darin raises some very valid points that involve how skewed this is that a mediocre-and-rapidly-worsening program like Bonvoy could somehow win first place in any category except Most Precipitous Decline or Hates Elite Members The Most. When you have a fallacy that glaring it tends to invalidate the results.
Exactly. The fact that TAP swept the entire category for Europe tells me the voting system is not correct. I will venture to say that TAP marketing/pr had an internal campaign to have as many family and friends vote as possible. This is completely absurd. The voting should be moved to a group of 500 global influencers and bloggers within the travel industry and drop the public voting aspect or else a selected/invited group of Flyer Talk or other members. There is clearly a lot of horseplay going on here.
Why would anyone take this seriously?
Apparently whoever counts the votes did not recognize the sarcasm of voting for Marriott.