Originally Posted by
sbm12
There are more miles than seats out there. Artificially capping the total number at 37,500 makes no sense.
The second point I was making was to counter your theory that having one-way rewards would preclude return trip folks from booking rewards. They would still book them, more easily than before because they can pay for the return trip in cash and not have to find both directions as a reward trip. Sure, that means the airline gets some cash and some miles off the books but most of the time they prefer all cash and no miles redeemed.
Of course my example is simplistic. It was intended to be, in order to make the point.
In the real world, there are millions of miles in customers' accounts, but relatively fewer award seats. If anything, the real world would magnify the effect I described in my simplistic example, because the asymmetry would affect many more potential roundtrip redeemers.
As far as the second point, I still don't see how the airline suffers. No matter what, as long as customers are paying cash and keeping the miles in their accounts, the company benefits. The more expensive the one-way ticket paid in cash, the more the company benefits. But even if the one-way ticket is dirt cheap, the company benefits twice, first by keeping the miles away from an award and, two, by earning at least a little cash it othwerise would not have.
The point remains that one-way redeemers add to the scarcity of roundtrip award inventory by creating asymmetry. If they are really doing a roundtrip by buying one of the legs, then the company benefits anyway.
Where's the problem?