You have your hypothesis, I have mine. Unfortunately, there is no good methodological way of analyzing whether the growth of "churning" and pushing "Fly for freeeeee" on a larger audience, who mostly consisted of non-value customers, actually played a role in airlines' decision that the economic benefits of loyalty did not justify the cost of generous mileage programs.

As one article explained, "The purpose of a frequent-flier program is to build loyalty and retain customers who generate a lot of profits. Mileage runners aim to buy tickets with the lowest cost per mile and extract as many points as possible from them; this is not high-margin behavior the airlines want to encourage. And increasingly, they aren’t."


Unless you were involved in the decisionmaking of each program, you also have no basis for insisting how wrong I am.