Originally Posted by eternaltransit

Similar to the discussion on the BA board about their changes, it's harder to change the earning rates on credit cards, because selling miles to credit card partners is a nice and easy profitable business for everyone involved as it generally does seem to incentivise spend quite well. Well everyone apart from merchants, but then they just jack up the price anyway. In fact, it's sometimes (and usually, if well managed) much more profitable to operate a loyalty scheme than it is to actually fly the planes around - although you need to fly some planes around to offer an aspiration redemption possibility for actually get the whole eco-system moving. The planes are like a loss-leader. In my opt cited example, QF is a company that does exactly this: it makes money from the loyalty program (2xxM AUD profit from loyalty), but loses money on planes (500M AUD losses from flying).

That means airlines and points issuers don't want to rock the boat too much in a way that makes the credit card offering seem less attractive - not many people look at the devaluation of the currency by looking at redemption prices - especially as you can target your devaluations at certain routes, hide them in minimum fare types to boost cash revenue etc., but it's much more noticeable to notice a drop in earning rate from 1 per USD to say, 0.5 per USD. Additionally, partners will have contracts with the points issuers which insulates them to a certain extent, or guarantees the point purchase cost for certain times, so it takes longer for these changes to filter down the chain to non-directly controlled earning methods.