Originally Posted by
d00t
He's on the CX side. Cathay has really messed up their business by allowing Asia Miles to be totally seprated from Marco Polo. Asia miles is incentivized to always play the short term game of miles sales and actively avoid redemptions, while Marco Polo is a longer-term play designed to drive more revenue to the airline. Their interests are not aligned and this creates a position where someone like Steve might struggle to get Asia Miles onboard with the logic as the companies are very separated in long term strategies.
With alliances and partner redemptions I'm not so sure miles sales and redemptions can be controlled so closely.
CX revenue control decides how many seats to put up for miles and how many for cash
They can then filter a bit using own miles-only availability/Priority One/Priority Two, but currently they're restrained in how much they apply restrictions (perhaps they desire a certain amount of overseas FFP revenue)
AM is merely geared to pushing as many miles out the door as they can convince people to redeem iPads for them
Originally Posted by
d00t
Most FFPs around the world operate as one unit with shared long term interests. I can only assume Asia Miles was, and is positioned in a way to be sold off.
AAdvantage and Alaskan (Alaskan Mileage Plan really puts Alaska on the Canto travel blogging map) seem to be nothing but a cheap conduit to acquire CX seats until recently (yes I know that is parochial and not objective but that's what it looks like from here)