Modest Suggestion For Loyalty Points
 

If the intent behind loyalty points is to reward spend vs miles flown, then why shouldn’t I receive loyalty points when I buy tickets for my family? I’m choosing to spend the money on AA vs a competitor and it’s my loyalty to AA that’s driving that decision. It just makes sense that I should get the loyalty points if I want them. Especially if we’re all flying under the same reservation.

In other words, give me the option to have the points flow to my account vs their accounts, earning what I’d earn if it were me flying. Hell, even if I’d earn at the basic AAdvantage earning level, I’d still feel as though AA is recognizing my decision to steer my family’s business to AA.

Great idea. Knowing AA though...they will probably make you pay a *fee* to do that at check out.

I’d pay a reasonable fee to have that as an option.

Under this type of system, a huge percentage here would lose the status they get via employer-paid travel.

If you pay for your family's travel with a Barclays or Citi AAdvantage card, you will earn Loyalty Points for the amount charged to your card. I suspect that that's about as good as it's going to get.

I would tend to agree with this idea.

My wife has an ice-cube's chance of ever breaking into Gold territory with her infrequent flying, so LP's she earns are essentially useless. Steering her LP's my way (since they were paid with my wallet) would be nice.
I would then contend that LP's earned by her CC should also flow to my account - which is something we could accomplish via an Authorized User on one of my cards.
But I think OP's idea has close to zero chance of materializing into actual AA policy.

All that said, I usually burn AA miles for my wife's tickets and pay cash for mine.
Since we have plenty of RDM, and her tickets are really just leisure travel, AND we have no interest in her earning status.
Don't want to give AA actual $$ for her tickets, since the marginal gains of a cash ticket over award ticket don't have much value for her.

Just my 2 cents on OP's idea.

I have already predicted here that this will happen eventually.

Absolutely. Law of unintended consequences and all that. Luckily I've been my own employer and employee for 20 years.
Who would have believed last year that AA would make it possible to earn even the highest-level earnable status purely through shopping and hotel stays? I have nearly 140K LPs right now with no flying.

How are the company holiday parties? Lonely? ;)

Actually they have been a lot of fun when I've had them. For 6 years I owned and ran a real business with 40+ employees and our parties were a blast. The rest of the time I've been an independent consultant and have been quite happy to party with just friends and family.

Don't you need to have at least 30 segments? Honestly they've made this program confusing. My goal is to make PP (and not do extra trips for EXP), settle more for MCE now that food and booze are back, and buy first when I truly want first.

But yeah I get your point. Loyalty is no longer about patronizing the airline's course business.

It's not unintended if it's plainly foreseeable.

There's no chance of this idea happening. People already get LP for anything they charge to their AA CC, but AA isn't going to get into the business of having people assign or disclaim LP from actual flying. It would be an administrative nightmare, plus AA would upset millions of business travelers. And even if it was as simple as "the buyer gets all LP for everything," the CEO of Deloitte having 20 bazillion LP wouldn't do AA any good.

Exactly. The reason that this won't happen is that the whole point of loyalty programs (or at least one of the main reasons that they exist) is to give kickbacks to people who travel using OPM and have their choice of airline.

Yup.

Why do you hate your family?

Quote of the day. Love it!