A little premature to declare that now, but this could certainly be potentially proven true in, say, 5 - 10 years from now. While an imperfect analogy, generally speaking, those changes viewed negatively by the most sophisticated consumers (which I consider FT to be comprised of) will improve bottom line performance over the longer term.

This reminds of me, though not perfectly, when DAL decided to change their mileage program with all the blogs decrying that the "sky pesos" era has arrived. On this, I thought, good change, and has the potential to transform DL as best in class (in terms of financial metrics and performance) amongst its peers. Not predicting anything, but I'm open to the possibility that MAR may pull off something similar.