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Old Dec 3, 2015 | 7:10 am
  #21  
sdsearch
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Originally Posted by Andy2
It all started when American Airlines needed a marketing tool to differentiate itself. It invented the frequent flier program and it worked. For a while. Until the competitors did the same thing.
Which happened the very next day!

Please get your frequent flier program history correct. First of all, the first frequent flier programs predated AA by at least a couple years. It's just that AA is the oldest one to have survived through to today. (Most people don't care about Texas International's FFP because no one's flown them for decades! )

Second, UA was about to announce theirs, and AA learned of this and so AA rushed their announcement to a day before UA. So the competition was there immediately. Now, AA and UA were not as dominant as they are today, of course (this was before many rounds of mergers and acquisitions and airline deaths).
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