There will be an article in the magazine of the upcoming Sunday Times entitled "Points of No Return." A different version was posted on the NYT.com web site yesterday under the heading "The Man Who Turned Credit-Card Points Into an Empire". The article is likely paywalled.

The hook is Brian Kelly and him bringing points, miles, and CC churning to the mainstream. But the fairly comprehensive article goes much deeper than that, discussing the MS community among other things which is obv more nerdish than the target audience of TPG. The experience of several veterans of FT and BoardingArea are discussed, too.

On the one hand, I find the article pretty decent journalism. On the other hand, I'm afraid this article is just an indication of our hobby going down the drain.

An analogy would be online poker: 15 years ago, any intelligent person with a willingness to study the right forum could make $100 profit an hour playing online poker. Nowadays, the game has advanced tremendously, it's gotten waay less profitable, and even online stakes as low as $50 buy-in can only be consistently beat by expert players who put in the required volume, have a decent grasp of game theory, etc.

In the miles & points game, of course, the enemy is big data, business intelligence, data analytics, whatever you want to call it and not your fellow FTer. The article is more optimistic than me, noting that travel remains as aspirational as ever. As so many people love it, there will remain to be businesses trying to modify people's behavior by provided travel-related miles and points as the carrot. I don't disagree qualitatively.... However, I am much more skeptical about the quantitative possibilities. In my view, technology will get better and better and make it harder and harder for a select few to earn outsized rewards. Just my 2c. Again, really good article.