<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">I'm struck that in all this conversation, no one has commented on the huge amount of bonus miles CO has been giving out. You've all been trading info back and forth and racking up huge mileage totals for a long time now.

If you think of miles as a currency, what CO has been doing is printing more milacos", without much increase in goods (redeemable seats) to back up this inflation.

As in any economy, this will eventually cause inflation, or distortions through rationing or price controls. Seats are unavailable due to capacity controls, and milacos go unused, that is distortion; the price (in milacos or dollars for the underlying item on option -- the original seat) goes up, that's inflation.

I would also expect that in the dual system of "value awards" at current milaco levels vs. "choice awards" at inflated levels, less and less inventory will be allocated to the uninflated awards.

Add to this the fact that, at least to Europe, CO offers proportionately fewer premium seats in the first place.

What did everybody expect?

Reading these boards, I see that most airlines are chipping away at their FF programs on the edges, and starting to match the less appealing parts of their competitors' programs rather than the greater. Sigh.</font>