Originally Posted by
CloudCoder
It's quite a stretch to believe that AA lost money due to an overabundance of 100K miles per year flyers.
I'd disagree. Where I formerly worked (back when upgrades were easy to use), if we flew Y on flights >5 hours, we got 50% of the difference between Y->J. I often booked Y, used an upgrade cert or miles, and took home a significant pile of cash regularly. So airlines (not just AA) lost a large sum of money that I got to pocket half of. Since it only takes $12M to reach ExPlat, one could easily "cost" an airline half of that by burning 4 upgrade certs instead of paying for J. IMO, this could easily make the passenger a negative value passenger, even if they're ExPlat.