Originally Posted by
weero
But what is the incentive there?
Good questions? I guess it is helpful for some of the HONs who just qualified by 600.001k miles. Makes life much more easy for them.
Originally Posted by
andre1970
But apparently, LH is cash constrained
(OK, time to sell 
) and needs money now. And how beautiful it is to have the option to (partially) "borrow" cash against a liability whose terminal value is fully under your control... You can always enhance the program and, boom, your debt goes down by as much as you want.
So, I guess, it makes perfect sense for both sides: LH can't count on anyone's loyalty nowadays to partially secure medium-term liquidity, for the simple reason that nobody's unconditional loyalty can be thought as "given" nowadays.
And no, it is not the small/large/medium influx of new Cessna HONs™ the factor that will lead to the devaluation of the program. I'm afraid the decision on the devaluation has already been taken
deliberately. So the new "price" of around 10K should also give people a clue about the extent to which LH is willing to commit to "HON service as we know it".
Nice analysis and I pretty much agree with you ^
And how beautiful it is to have the option to (partially) "borrow" cash against a liability whose terminal value is fully under your control... You can always enhance the program and, boom, your debt goes down by as much as you want.
While I agree that it is an easy why to generate cash it would probably be a better deal for LH to simply sell HON cards for 20k EUR and the black market