Originally Posted by zkzkz

There were a few years recently when airline travel was way down. Chase would have been happy to convert you to a Sapphire user I'm sure but I guess they were afraid of losing customers to other cashback cards or other cards with more flexible points. They were presumably looking at potentially losing a big chunk of their business if a lot of customers cancelled airline cards en masse and only a fraction of them would have been retained by converting them to Sapphire etc.

I assume they looked at what it costs them to buy AP points and what they were making from swipe fees and aimed to make this cost them the same fraction. I guess there would be some corrective factor to cover the benefit of encouraging people to put more travel spend on their Chase card in order to PYB that expense away but I can't imagine that's a major factor.