Why VIPorter is a raw deal

With my dad looking at taking a series of Porter flights in the next few weeks and months the topic of the cheapest way to get around by air came up. With Porter Airlines being the cheapest, and arguably fastest way of getting to downtown Toronto the consideration wasn’t whether to take Porter so much as whether their points program, VIPorter, was worth taking into consideration.

VIPorter is a a very simple rewards program in that you gain points by flying, and you redeem rewards when you have 7500 for a free flight. There are three different ticket price classes, firm, flex, and freedom, each with their own flight cancellation perks, and each with their own fixed amount of points per flight. This prompted an interest in finding the cheapest tickets in each ticket classes to maximize number of flights you can take with the least cost.

There are a series of given values used in the following charts:

The following chart outlines, for each of the three price tears, the ticket costs for each of the flights, the number of points earned from each, the money needed to get a free trip, and the cost per flight with the free trip.

Equations:

Points/$ = Points/ Cost

Free Trip Cost= 7500/(Points/$)

$/Flight with Free Trip = Free Trip Cost/(Paid Flights till a Free Flight + 1)

Thus the best value for money for the Firm class is the $193 ticket which gives you 1.94 points/Dollar, costing $3860 and 20 flights to get a free trip, and $183.8 for each trip (free flight included). For the Flex class it will cost $249 per trip, giving one 3.01 points/trip, requiring 10 trips and $2490 to get the free flight, and works out to $226 per trip when the free flight is factored in. The Freedom class will cost $377 per flight, at 3.97 points per flight, require 5 flights and $1885 to get the free trip, and works out to $314 per flight when the free trip is factored in.

These calculations don’t tell the whole story though. The implication so far is that you will only ever need to travel the exact number of times needed to get a free flight, which is an ideal case and not at all a common reality. One is also the assume that you will always choose the same class, a reasonable assumption for the majority of people. The assumption is also made that you only ever travel when the tickets are at the cheapest in each class, not a completely realistic assumption but a necessary one. Without this assumption a comparison of all possible price-point combinations would have to be made, seriously over-complicating the charts for the purposes of this comparison The errors would be the same when you consider that the prices of the different class tickets always change at the same time, meaning that your cost would have increased regardless of your choice.

The following is a series of charts, followed by a graph, which shows the breakdown of the different prices, per flight, for each of the three classes, adjusted to include free flights.

Each of these charts shows the number of flights paid for, the number of flights actually flown (including the free flights), the points gained from the flights, the decimal and usable number of free flights, the total cost of the trips paid for, the cost per flights paid for, and the cost per flight taken.

Firm

Flex

Freedom

Equations:

Points = Flights Paid * Points per Flight

Free Flights = 7500/Points

Exact Free Flights = QUOTIENT( Free Flights)

Total Cost = Flights Paid * Cost / Flight

Cost/Flight = Total Cost/Flights Paid

Cost/ Flight with Free Flight = Total Cost/(Flights Paid +1)

Having calculated all these values the conclusions reached are represented graphically by the chart bellow which shows the breakdown of the costs per flight for any given number of flights between 1 and 50.

Cost per flight graph of the three price classes of Porter tickets Freedom (yellow), Flex (red), and Firm (blue).

Based on the results shown in this chart on can see that, though it might seem like a better choice to buy the more expensive tickets in the attempt to get more free flights faster, its is still significantly cheaper to buy the cheapest ticket. As such, and as one could suspect, there really isn’t any noticeable savings gained from the VIPorter program over an extended period of time.