Originally Posted by
JIMCHI
It doesn't matter how she earned them. American and its credit card affiliates badly wanted her to earn those miles. But now that she's earned them she can only take half of the trips she thought she could take when she signed up for the card, paid the annual fees, and charged many dollars to them. She could have (should have ?) signed up for a cash back card instead. American makes a LOT of money from the credit cards but they are going to see a whole lot less now that the program has been devalued by 50% by essentially requiring AAnytime awards to be used. A whole lot of people are going to be cancelling those cards in the future as they discover they can't use the 25,000 miles or so that they earned. We cancelled my wife's CitiAAdvantage card and I will probably cancel mine.
My point was to demonstrate the no-win situation airlines have created by giving out miles like candy, then devaluing them. As AA received cash from Citi and Barclays when the miles were "earned", it is to their financial advantage for customers to sit on them, eventually allow at least some to expire. Question is how it will affect loyalty long-term.