The endless saga of Air Berlin and their frequent flier program Topbonus enters yet another chapter as members just received a mailer announcing they can now collect miles again and even redeem them.
Unfortunately the redemption is limited to vouchers for various products and travel services that come with lots of drawbacks and could be perceived as a bad joke at best.
Whoever thought this out must either be a genius or an outright idiot, hard to say which is true because the ratio in which these miles can be redeemed is a complete joke and accumulating any more miles in this program would be absolutely stupid by any means.
You should be able to find the following mailer in your email:
Wow. Just wow! This must be one (if not THE) worst ratios ever for redeeming miles. On top of it you now have a frequent flyer program that doesn’t allow you to redeem miles to… well, fly. Let that sink in for a little!
Sure this is a bit better the saying all miles are worthless effective immediately but it’s not far from that. The value of these vouchers can be neglected. You’ll almost always be able to find a better deal for the services and products offered through the Air Berlin Pop Up Shop by a simple online search. I’ve always had much better prices for rental cars booking via Orbitz compared to via Sixt directly.
You can access their shop (junkyard) here and should make sure you have your country setting for Germany to see all options.
Conclusion
I’m not sure who would voluntarily credit miles to Topbonus at this point and for all eternity. They have lied to and defrauded members to a massive extent and now make it sound like a privilege to collect again? Not to talk about these laughable redemption options.
I can’t help but be very blunt about this program and whatever will happen with it but what is proposed here is absolutely horrible. If you want to redeem these vouchers go ahead but I don’t think they will be of much (if any) use. You can just as well leave them in the account and see if at a later time better redemption options will follow. After all with the continuation of the program like this Topbonus admitted they are operational and should at some point offer a better deal. But who knows if there won’t be another lie on the way.
