as a customer of points.com or anything they do, a person should not need to know all the nuances of how they run their company. You pay points.com to do X, and it should do X. Whether they have to pay or deal with any other entity should never come into play for the customer.

We are, however, in an era where this very thing has been ripped open and seriously challenged by companies. Now it IS on the onus of the savvy and persistent customer to learn and navigate thru these often multi-leveled and confusing systems in order to get what they merely thought would be an easy click.

You can see some places where it's more clearly described, like, if you were to say transfer miles between member accounts at Northwest airlines, for example. It says the transaction is powered by points.com. The thing works pretty well (I had to do it on 2 occasions long ago) but if there are problems you would have to deal with points.com and not the airline.

I do not think that's the way it should be, but at least NWA tells you this right there on the transaction page. And fortunately in my 2 cases, nothing did go wrong.

had it, I am sure --from other past points.com experiences, I would have been frustrated.