Originally Posted by
eponymous_coward
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.
I've said it a hundred times over the past couple decades: if I were to start a FFP from scratch NO WAY would I go with a miles-based structure. It never ever made one lick of sense to me. But to airline execs raised in the days of regulated prices it made perfect sense because in those days distance = price, or at least the two were fairly well correlated. And even post-regulation that model still could generally be loosely applied. But by the time I was doing 100k miles a year in the late 90s that model was gone and I could fly from DC to Singapore for less than I could fly to Des Moines, Iowa.
So it may well simply be that today's airline execs were, like me, raised in the post distance=price era and so divorced their companies from that model. But having their social media feeds filled with cheapskates bragging about how they were hacking the airlines certainly was rubbing salt.
Anyway, again, all still just speculation...