Originally Posted by
songsc
A surprisingly high number of people can’t properly understand sunk costs and opportunity costs.
Many people think that if they can’t have some sort of status after flying so much, they are at a “loss”. If they can’t utilize their status benefits to the fullest, they are at a “loss”. This is why many travellers keep flying Air Canada despite not enjoying the flying experience at all, because they care about “maximizing” the status benefits, instead of having a good flying experience. This is exactly what loyalty program is trying to achieve, creating sunk costs, aka status and benefits, for travellers. Many people consider e-ups, priority rewards, points, etc, as some sort of “unearned revenues” that they have to use before they expire, instead of some sorts of prepaid expenses that they hopefully paid zero costs, or whatever they spent during mileage runs.
I used to care about status, now I just care about how to fly J on an airline of my choice.
Status is an interesting game, one you could easily argue is not worth playing. Whether it’s been worth flying all these years to maintain status is likely measurable, but since I tend to use a lot of my rewards on family and friends, I do get a fair bit of joy out of sharing what I have accumulated, which is less easy to measure (although likely could come down to dollars spent if I wanted to track it). Being SE does have its perks, in particular access to the concierge. I would imagine other carriers have a similar service. I also have flown and will fly reward flights in J and F that I likely wouldn’t pay for out of pocket, in particular NH and LH F and soon EK F, although again this could be measured in dollars spent if I had measured it. For those of us that love flying and are interested in the industry, there are endless hours of entertainment (part of the reason we are on these blogs),which is also difficult to measure. What would we complain about if AC was perfect all the time?