Originally Posted by GrayAnderson

I think curbing rewards programs might be doable. The question is how to try and make it so it's mostly a question of "which airline do I pick for X travel?" versus "Should I fly vs driving/taking the train?"

I'd note that, IIRC, at least in Europe a lot of the growth in air travel has been down to ULCC (and their close friends) making travel highly accessible (sometimes through slashing costs, sometimes through playing games with how the cost is allocated) and that a lot of that travel would not be happening at lower price points.

One thing that might be worth looking into (as we wander afield) would be restricting the number of seats that can be sold below marginal cost (i.e. O'Leary's "I'll pay you to fly with me" gimmicks get banned).

Back to the underlying issue, however, I think the case behind bailing out the non-ULCCs but not the ULCCs is that, aside from infamously bad corporate behavior (Ryanair's been rather a scofflaw in terms of EU261 compensation) I do think that making a case on bailing out carriers operating a transportation network and serving to facilitate business makes more sense, in terms of "bailout triage", than exclusively or highly leisure-oriented operations.

Edit: And I do think that, even if you're going to bail out ULCCs, taking into account prior behavior as far as terms for said bailouts is reasonable.