I find this fascinating from a business strategy perspective. There is a bit of a vogue in US companies - these can usually be traced back to a particular book or seminar series - of "simplification", and concentrating selling efforts on the few customers that generate the most revenue, the so called "building a moat". The "long tail" is then farmed out to other selling methods and viewed as a sort of second division. Support levels are decreased and discounting becomes a thing of the past. The idea is that you keep the long tail generating revenue without servicing and that there is sufficient inertia and habit to ensure that the customers who do go elsewhere are replaced by higher revenue from those who remain.

That's all very well in principle, but the issue is it creates quite a fragile structure. If your moat fails, you lose a lot of business at once. I liken it to making a sword. It is in principle possible to create a very sharp sword using carbon infused steel, but the treated elements are fragile and easy to shatter. So you create a case hardened sword where the core is soft and flexible, but the outer shell is razor sharp. Most successful businesses have evolved "case hardened", so to speak, and the strategy outlined above is really trying to re-engineer and re-configure the business with less emphasis on the core.

In terms of selling, having a large volume of repeat business that's relatively easy to generate, high margin, and outsourcing your services to third parties, is generally a good method of creating insurance against shocks to the higher value top end. That's really the role of Travel Agents, which exist as full service partners to an airline, or as discount OTAs, there's a whole hierarchy. P*ss these guys off and your core can dwindle very quickly. AA seem to be thinking that an Amazon style essentially un-serviced automated selling system can replace the network, and I suspect they're about to find out it doesn't work like that. And to experiment with this in the most profitable segment - business travel - seems to me to be bonkers.

The thing is, business fads come and go. This is a part of a fad. A smart business is looking to pick revenue off by differentiating using the pain fads cause to customers. AA doesn't look to me to be smart. If AA don't appear in corporate or business booking systems with decent prices, they're out of the game. If I wanted to attack them, this is where I would start, the soft underbelly without a moat.

I've no particular skin in this game, I don't fly American all that much anyway, but I do use them from time to time and I've noted big fare increases and very poor quality soft product. I'm not at all interested in the points "ecosystem", I want to get from Point A to Point B as efficiently as I can, within policy, ideally earning some Avios.