Originally Posted by
gregorygrady
Recently it seems that the bloggers have been really ruining deals for us FTers. Tricks/deals that some of us may have known about and kept on the downlow (sometimes for years) somehow get on the radar of a blogger who then disects it and spoonfeeds it to their blog readers step by step.
The bloggers ruin it by spoonfeeding all of our hardearned info to lazy people who can't be bothered to take the time to browse through FT on their own to find deals. Now I'm sure there will be plenty of FTers with under 100 posts who will come out to flame me and defend these bloggers as doing a "needed service". However for the rest of us who are mad about losing out on deals to the lazy blog leeches, maybe we should try to do something about it, preferably hitting bloggers where it hurts (ie, credit card referral signup links).
Interesting perspective, but I can't say I completely agree.
First, I think blogs put out a lot of content that isn't available or easy to find on flyertalk. Frequent Miler's 5% reload, Lucky's find of Aer Lingus with Avios, my thorough valuation of each mileage currency.
And I don't think they've killed all the deals you claim. For instance no surcharges on Avios from Brazil was not killed by blogs. This is back as a current deal.
But the main issue I have is that you, and I, and most of the people complaining about deals being killed didn't actually start the deal. Instead someone else found the deal, told us here, and we used it.
So, as I understand, you're advocating to still get access to the free deals and tricks but to limit other people's access to it, so you can exploit the deals and tricks longer.
Why? I don't understand what superior claim you or I have to those tricks as compared to a blog reader.
I appreciate your position though, and I think a vigorous debate on the issue is warranted.