Water under the bridge The most recent business direction was to be a reseller with a focus on the auto sales/services category. Whether it's Aeroplan or any other program.
The Globe and Mail today: 'cut-rate battle for the high end buyer of cars". Luxury car brands offer low-interest loans, rebates and employee pricing in a bid to lure customers. (These incentives would also apply to all other cars).
So how can Aeroplan be used as an effective incentive, without being crowded out by all the other incentives? If they can answer this, Futura can have a good future despite all this creditor protection process going on.
The problem is, how does Aeroplan respond with a dealer's $5000 cash back incentive. Very tough. Giving 100,000 miles will not cut it for a new car purchase. $5000 saving can put a person on Air Canada for two to anywhere in the world economy class with a lot of money left over. Or can buy more merchandise, than can be done with the Aeroplan program.
I don't think Aeroplan has an answer and that's why Futura's expectations were dashed in 2012. Three things went against Futura. The Aeroplan program itself, the fact that car dealer are operated as franchisees (making it more costly to sign-on) and the " the least loyal customer-- nature of auto sales/services (making it difficult to successfully implement a loyalty program for these categories).
No cream of the crop here like the national chains. Those Tier 1 businesses are the clients of Air Miles and Aeroplan themselves.
Everything taken together, it's one reason Futura is under CCAA. The other reason is the debt built up over the years, experimenting with various programs. I think the creditors, with their easy money, encouraged Futura to go further when it should have done more due diligence.
But that's water under the bridge and now only wondering if a future even exists for the company. If anything, I want to learn something from this so it doesn't happen again. I sure paid for this coarse.