I think every program feature either adds or subtracts value individually to the customer.

One-way awards are of value to any customer who requires them. But CO does not have one-way awards, only a semantic fallacy, that is a roundtrip award where you can book only half the value.

Second, regarding your point of one-way awards reducing the value to CO because they make it easier for customers to redeem miles, I do not agree. Sure, this has been the accepted wisdom in the industry for a long time, but the fact is that every one-way award represents, in of itself, a redemption for that segment at full value.

Of course, on the surface, the value to the company is reduced because the company didn't oblige the customer to redeem the full value of his or her roundtrip miles.

But let's not forget that award inventory in highly limited. Every time a customer takes a one-way award seat out of this inventory, he or she has asymettrically upset the apple cart. Now there is one seat gone that could have represented one of the two segments on a roundtrip redemption. Thus, each one-way redemption represents, in effect, an additional restriction on a full roundtrip redemption.

In effect, therefore, allowing one-way redemption, even at 50% of the rt value, would increase the difficullty, in the macro sense, of customers to redeem their miles, and thus reduce the effective value of their miles, especially since we can reasonably estimate that the vast majority of customers will want to book roundtrip award tickets.

Finally, regarding your point about the hotel example, the economic principle is still completely relevant, but the irrelevant sidebar is still irrelevant.

Actually, the irrelevant sidebar in fact only supports the basic economic principle, which is one regarding the nature of demand and the behavior of markets, namely that consumers will not act against their own best self-interest.