Interesting and heartening in my view, though I recognize that AS can still go revenue based whenever they want. And a classic FlyerTalk question from the analyst, more or less explicitly “revenue-based works better for me; do you know who I am, a high-vale customer? Given that I win with revenue based, it must be best for the airline!”

And then a pretty effective takedown of that argument by the AS execs: “OK, but there’s a significant customer base that is not like you, and we’re the only ones left with a frequent flyer program that caters to that customer base, and they get our credit card and then go to alaskaair.com without even looking at the competition, which is good for us.”