pinniped

I don't live in NYC or BOS, so this is all JHMO, but...

I believe AA's target audience is regular business travelers who do at least somewhat frequent commutes from NYC or BOS. These are people who might otherwise use JetBlue for those flights.

The thought is that AA gets these fliers to take their four R/T's on AA early in the year (to get the free tickets), and a lot of them are likely to keep flying the route all year long. 4 JFK-LAX R/T's has you basically at Gold status, on your way to Plat, lots of bonus and promo miles flowing in, with upgrades in your future. Therefore, you aren't likely to bail and go back to JetBlue - you'll keep buying your JFK-LAX on AA and therefore become profitable.

As for the economics of the deal, even if I lived in New York it wouldn't be worth it unless I already had a need to fly the qualifying flights. $320 for a ticket to Asia? Sounds good. $320 + two or three days of my life for a ticket to Asia? Sounds BAD.

Even piling on all of the bonus miles, AA knows that the number of pure mileage runners jumping on this is small in the grand scheme of things. Still, in keeping with the mantra of every FF program in the world, the butt-in-seat concept is king.

Edited to add: after rereading this post, I realized that I never answered the underlying philosophical question that we are talking about to begin with: why is butt-in-seat the king of all FF rules? I don't really know, but I guess it goes back to the fact that the miles were originally intended to reward loyalty to the most frequent travelers, nearly all of whom flew for business. The airlines would take a suggestion of "Can't I just have the miles?" as gaming the system without building loyalty to the carrier. At least that's my idea...

[This message has been edited by pinniped (edited Jan 21, 2004).]