Originally Posted by swag

I don't buy this at all.

I've been through air/hotel mergers before, and I don't remember ever having to grant permission to merge accounts, Certainly not in the sense that denying permission or just ignoring it was a viable alternative. You're correct that they can minimize IT and customer service headaches if they get positive confirmation in advance that the accounts holders actually match, but that's exactly what the account linking did.

Once we've linked accounts, they shouldn't need additional permission. The customer has confirmed the accounts match, so there should be no errors introduced by the merge process. An exception would be if there were some benefit to delaying the merge, for example if they decided that once you merge, you can no longer qualify for lifetime status in the legacy programs, but there's not yet been any indication that this will be the case.