FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Airline fee $250/$200/$100 reimbursement reports: UA only (2020-21)
Old Jan 5, 2020, 4:33 pm
  #19  
STS-134
 
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: SF Bay Area
Programs: UA MileagePlus (Premier Gold); Hilton HHonors (Gold); Chase Ultimate Rewards; Amex Plat
Posts: 6,605
Originally Posted by arshi007
Actually there's more to the story than that. The credit cards also use this data to mark your travel so that if you credit card is suddenly being used 1000 miles from your home, they don't automatically fraud alert coz the itinerary data allows them to feed into their fraud alert system. I'm not saying this is good or bad, just saying there's "convenience for users" and then "benefits to credit card companies". It's all interlinked.
Sure, having a CC declined is annoying, but I don't see how avoiding this benefits the airlines. Plus, if you use cards from multiple issuers, this data would only help the situation with a single issuer. There are other was of getting travel information too, for example, if the card was used to reserve a hotel. They don't need to know exactly where, but they will know you are traveling when the card is used at check-in for a sort of hold/deposit on the room. And actually, Chase told me many years ago to just stop giving them travel updates. Seems that they decided it was more costly to process all of these updates than it was to just have an automated system watch my transactions. I have never had a card declined since, even when I book airfares on other cards.

Bottom line though, I see few advantages airlines can gain from handing this data over to the CC companies, and they have a lot to lose if competitors use this data to advertise directly to travelers. And in fact, if UA reinstated the gift registry and stopped giving this data to Amex, they'd have even more captive customers who would have $150-250 per year to burn on UA tickets. They're shooting themselves in the foot here by giving Amex this data.
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