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Thread: The End is Near
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Old Aug 10, 2007, 7:13 pm
  #4  
gleff
FlyerTalk Evangelist
 
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: DCA
Programs: AMC MovieWatcher, Giant BonusCard, Petco PALS Card, Silver Diner Blue Plate Club
Posts: 22,297
Where even to begin?

Do you have any data on greater willingness of credit card users to spend more points for the same seats?

Not that it matters, since you seem to misunderstand the economics of award seats. Availability of capacity controlled seats is is driven by excess capacity that airlines don't expect to sell. As airline loads increase those seats become tougher. Willingness to spend double the miles to buy out of capacity controls doesn't mean fewer seats available at the lower mileage price.

To be sure, printing more miles means more competition for capacity controlled seats. But why does one class of program members deserve the seat more than another? (and this ignores even the fact that many airlines set aside award seats that only their elite level frequent flyers can redeem...)

'Credit card miles' are profitable to airlines, just as flying (sometimes) is, occasionally even more so. Members buy into a reward scheme either way, behave according to set rules, and have the same legitimate expectation to use their miles.

And geez.. It's almost surreal to suggest that frequent flyers are somehow society's "poor" and that in any kind of class struggle folks here on Flyertalk would be the revolutionaries left in control of the means of production after the materialist dialectic hurdles us towards a Trotskyite free award seat Utopia ("if only Snowball had won...").
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