I have no intentions of jumping onto the LoyaltyMatch bandwagon as a participating customer, because I get much better value out of my miles and points when not redeeming them for merchandise.

But here's the idea that sort of makes sense to me -- suppose I redeem 50,000 points in Program A for Toy A, and you redeem 100,000 points in Program B for Toy B. Program A's sponsor must think that they can provide me with Toy A at a reasonable cost to them (relative to 50,000 A points); siomilarly, Program B's sponsor must think they can provide you with Toy B at a reasonable cost to them (relative to 100,000 B points). At that point, should either Program A's sponsor or Program B's sponsor really care about whether I take Toy A and drop it into my local landfill, and/or whether you take Toy B and drop it into your local incinerator? Or that we trade toys with each other? Or that we sell them at our local garage sale or on an online marketplace, thus converting them into cash? Does it matter to them at all?

Well, perhaps they should care to the extent that if either one of us finds something to do with the toys that we enjoy or benefit from, we'll be more inclined to redeem our respective points for the respective toys. So if Program A's sponsor was anticipating 100 redemptions a month (each redemption at this expected level being expected to be a net benefit to them) but instead sees 200 redemptions a month, is that really a problem? Sure, at crazy high redemptions levels (say 100x their expectation, or 10,000 redemptions a month), Program A's sponsor might have to spend a lot more to acquire the 10,000th toy, or Program A's sponsor might have to take into account that they've erased such a huge number of points from their books that the marginal accounting benefit to them for erasing yet more points has changed. But that's easy for the sponsor to deal with -- they can change the redemption level for Toy A, or simply eliminate from their catalog altogether with the dreaded text "UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME - CHECK BACK LATER". And note making the toy unavailable for redemption doesn't interfere with the sponsor's supposedly primary business purpose of providing travel-related services, so yield management and maintaining price discrimination doesn't come into play.

If LoyaltyMatch can sucker pseudo-journalists like Tim Winship into saying ga-ga positive things about this, whereas he's pretty unrelentingly negative about anything that the programs themselves put out, why not quietly tolerate the business and whatever modest increased redemption activity levels it can create?