Originally Posted by
escape4
In general, yes, and in fact most people do. Except that some travellers cannot concentrate their flying on only one or two airlines if their travel pattern is global, hence the value of alliances.
But only one airline bears the cost of awarding that person their status.
Among the numerous airlines that an international flyer can use, most end up picking a program which gives interesting benefits. However if more and more airlines go AC's way with a high threshold for status which requires passengers to mostly fly with them and not partners, then it will make independents increasingly attractive, such as Emirates. It also makes the value proposition of flying with airlines in an alliance where you don't have status (Sky Team for me), a bit better. And definitely more attractive to concentrate more on One World to boost status there.
Most frequent flyers don't think like FlyerTalkers. They don't hold status across multiple airlines and they're not constantly trying to optimize their status and points earning. They often credit flights to their home airline even when they might do better to credit them elsewhere. They choose a lot of their flights on price and schedule. To the extent the airlines want to keep their FFPs competitive, it's with their
closest competitors. For example, EK, which runs a few flights a week to Canada, is not a close competitor to AC. The amount of business AC will lose to EK (and others like it) is likely tiny compared to what they expect to save in not handing out status to a bunch of Americans and Canadians with fake US addresses.
This is not the mid-2000s anymore, when airlines were constantly chasing market share. Obviously they've been losing tons of money through COVID, but before that, they had largely stopped chasing market share and tried to quit spending money attractive high-volume, low-profitability customers. If AC is eliminating the SQD discount for non-residents, you can be pretty sure that someone ran the numbers and realized it was costing them way more than it was making them. They're not stupid. They're well aware they'll lose some business. But they also have a good handle on what it costs to hand out status to all those people.