<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by wormwood:
Do you think goldpoints Radisson intended for a person to make one purchase and get credit for points hundreds of times?</font>
There have been times that i have intended to purchase a ticket, reserved it online but forgot about it for a few days, and went back to finish the purchase but the fare had gone up.
I had to pay the higher fare because, quite frankly, the airline doesn't care what i intended. What they care about is how much money goes from my bank account to theirs.
FF miles are not generosity or kindness or a gesture of goodwill -- they are a mathematically calculated amount of invisible tokens in the game the ailines have set up. If everyone actually cashed in these tokens, the airlines could never make good of them -- this sounds like a ponzi scheme, but it isn't because they have mathematically determined the real amount of financial liability that they have for those outstanding miles.
They bank (literally) on the fact that even the outrageously generous offers won't hurt them because the vast majority of those miles will never be used. For every $10,000 people are spending on magazines to get miles, they know for a fact that most of those miles will never be used, so they don't care.
If it turns out they were wrong, they'll change the rules to make themselves right again.
This is like going to vegas and complaining that a certain slot machine gives better odds to the player. Is it immoral to play that machine?
In the end, the house ALWAYS wins.
The entire point of the game is to try and take advantage of the statistical anomolies that show up in the course of the game so that individual players come out ahead from time to time. The house can change the rules whenever they please --- if selling these subscriptions is hurting them, they WILL change the rules. If they feel it was against the spirit of the offer, they can retroactively take away all the miles you earned -- thats in the rules, too!
They make the rules, they can change them at will, they can even change them AFTER THE FACT! Yet we're concerned their side of the game isn't getting a fair shake? We give them cold, hard cash -- they give us virtual tokens that have no value except whatever arbitrary value THEY decide on the day we decide to ask for something of tangible value in return.
Let me repeat -- IN THE END, THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS.
