Oh then earlier access to plan loading in nice in the US where everybody brings the kitchen sink onto the cabin, sigh.

Now the discounted upgrades, or free upgrades was nice, so losing “easy” access to this is sad, I can understand the AirNZ desire to get maximum price to the ‘luxury’ being sold, but now I’m on this side of the fence I’d prefer status quo…

I think my analogy is more apt. The FFs gain status through accumulating reward points. Now they no longer have the status but they still have the reward points. Previously, their bids for upgrades depended only on how many points they had, relative to other bidders (ie, ranking of status). The only change now is that there is an opportunity cost to using your high number of rewards to bid for an upgrade. Pricing the upgrade will make the market for them more efficient, but the FFs still have the advantage of a huge number of rewards to bid with, relative to other bidders. So the value of their rewards have not necessarily gone down because of the switch to an auction system, although I don’t know enough details of the system to judge whether they’re worth less now overall.

I think referring to the benefit which the FF’s no longer have as ‘status’ is muddying the waters a little.
 
If we were to say that FF’s had instead been rewarded with Air NZ bonds which they were told would pay 5% and then Air NZ announced that from now on it would pay 4% that seems to me be a closer, and more useful , analogy than thinking about it in terms of a loss of ‘status’. The FF’s have lost a material benefit which they will now have to pay cash for if they wish to retain it.
 
By the way from my observation it’s certainly true that some FF’s do think of their benefits as some sort of enhanced status but frankly some people think because they’ve got big exhaust pipes on their car they’re better off than the rest of us – it doesn’t mean that stealing their car would be, morally, OK.

Hey, it’s completely normal to be upset about having status stripped from you, particularly when people in competing institutions still have theirs. I don’t have any problem with them being upset, I just don’t think that means the changes are necessarily bad.

I don’t know how most employers deal with it: perhaps the employees have no choice about who to fly with. If they do then you’d think it would affect their decision, for sure. That’s more a problem for the employment contract than Air NZ, though.