Originally Posted by
GUWonder
If the US gets around to having substantially lower card-acceptance transaction fees for merchants -- more akin to the card processing costs applicable in some parts of the developed world -- the house of cards will come tumbling down for those living on bank card companies fleecing consumers in the aggregate. And then AA and its bank partners will have to figure out what to do to keep the loyalty program(s) from being viewed as a Ponzi-like scheme and/or an airline version of Green Stamps destined to be historical footnote and case study in losing consumer confidence. My bet is that it comes to being a lot like what we've seen already with Delta SkyMiles, but AA miles/points heads toward an even lower value than that before a major US airline loyalty program house of cards collapses.
....
That's also why AA did not touch the earning RDMs and redemption side of the loyalty program at this juncture, they know that the current changes are negative and hoping to smooth the transition and first hook the people into the new loyalty program, before step 2 (the RDM earning and spending devaluation). They are hoping that enough people will be lured into going all in with the new program, especially committing a lot of credit card spent on it, and when the RDM devaluation comes they will be already committed too deep and experiencing the "I am too far down into this to now back out" effect. This is also why they did the double-dipping in Jan-Feb, they really want to hook people in early and make it harder for them to get out, when the RDM devaluation hits.
For the same reason likely they made it harder to qualify if you drop status, they really want to box in people early to try to keep their current status, and discourage them from defecting to other programs or going free agent, knowing it will be harder to get back in, if you wanted to.