Originally Posted by
kokonutz
Obviously.
As I say, the question is what motivated them to do so.
It seems clear to me that certain airline execs came to view elites as over-entitled and poor ARPU to boot. Where did they learn that from? It is entirely plausible that hundreds of bloggers bragging about mileage runs, CC churning and CPM all over their social media feeds fed into that perception. Before the bloggers, miles and points enthusiasts were a subculture that stayed mostly below the radar. Bloggers got rich taking it mainstream, thereby increasing the potential liability to the companies along with a sense of embarrassment over being 'hacked' by 'travel hackers.' Travesty of the commons and all that.
It is also plausible that in the formerly more competitive US market these same executives could not get away with this race to the bottom no matter how over-entitled those elites became. Market disrupters would keep the big guys honest with more generous programs.
To me, it's most likely the confluence of those things. And some other factors.
FT got bought by Internet Brands and helpfully serves many, many ad impressions for airline credit cards. That's not exactly below the radar. I think the Venn diagram of "blog audience of FFP gamers" and "FT audience of FFP gamers" has a lot of overlap. The idea that "well, FT was fine but those nasty evil bloggers killed it"... I'm not sure I buy it. I think it all goes in the same lump of "well, these are customers that we don't really care if we fire".
But if you were to remove any distinction between FT and blogs and just say "the social media community of FFP gamers", I'd probably agree, it's some combination of both. Also, the US market (where 100% EQM/RDM on cheap fares existed) was different from, well, everywhere else (where fares on European/Asian airlines often did discriminate by coach fare class long, long before US carriers went to revenue-based programs).
It's not an unreasonable thing to think about if you think of the miles FFPs shell out for flying as a cost of doing business for the airline: "Well, Lufthansa or Singapore Air doesn't give their customers a lot of return on a cheap fare, why exactly do we have to? Oh, and look, we have Big Data™ now! We can figure out who are our best customers!"
Of course, airlines look at credit card FFP miles as revenue, not cost... which explains that end of the deal.