Herb687

To paraphrase J.P. Morgan: If you have to ask how many loyalty points is a lot, you don't have a lot.

stant

thats kind of missing the point though. it's not like american doesnt know where the activity in your account comes from. those LPs were dirt cheap. thats likely why those who got CK from them just got a 'teaser' CK long after the spend required to get it.

going on down the road consider the value to american from $50k revenue from loyalty points, compared to say a 50k airpass. they have got to be doing far better on the points than the airpass I'd wager. after all, the loyalty program is far more profitable than flying.

davecraze

Agreed, they are doing better much better on points than airpass. An additional complication is that the flying itself on airpass has various levels of profitability that changes constantly so even when they get their 60k upfront, they still don't know how profitable that person will be as they fly, but they must have enough data to feel comfortable with projected average profitability and just saying ok, since we got all the money, upfront and guaranteed, here is your CK.

It's going to be a logistical nightmare for AA to try and track the hundreds of sources of LPs (that are changing all the time) and carry that through as an attribute for every LP recorded for tens of millions of AAdvantage participants to know how profitable each LP is/was due to its source or how it was earned. They can look at something like these simplymiles corner cases for exception handling, but that isn't really scalable. The most efficient way to do this is to hold the LP as a constant and utilize a calibration (based on the specific profitability of the LP earning activity to AA) on the front end for how many LPs are awarded for that specified activity. Therefore you don't need attributes and modifiers to follow a unique LP through the system. Another advantage of that is you can easily do an LP to EQD calculation for something like CK qualification and it's just math. Maybe one day we will learn enough clues to help us figure out how it is done inside of AA.

ikwia

Back in the EQD days, CK challenges required the EQD to be from flights on AA metal. So I suspect that they do value flights on AA metal more than other flights. There has been some discussion of this here on FT, and some have theorized that JV flights are weighed equal to AA metal flights, and that would make some sense, even though the challenges weren't set up that way.

Eyenigma

[QUOTE=FullFare;34770951I have made lifetime 1K on United, perennial Diamond on Delta as well as million miles and even 100K on Alaska. We still stumble into EXP each year and have 7 million lifetime miles.[/QUOTE]

Holy s*** - how much do you fly? That's an insane amount. You must live in the sky. I thought I flew a lot.

FullFare

We do fly a lot, including business and going to see grandchildren, who are scattered all over the country. The Aairpass piles up miles from the companion's flight into my account, so that accelerates. Also, booking only J and F fares accelerates the miles. While I was miffed that AA wouldn't make me CK, I got over it long ago and spread my business elsewhere. Turned out to be a good thing for how my wife and I plan flying, and I suppose I thank AA for that. When we have challenges in travel, CK is not part of the solution to our problems, and that has pushed me into ways to innovate that I wouldn't have learned to use if I had CK to fall back on. There certainly was no financial benefit I missed. We give away all the FF miles to family, friends, and employees. I figure I would have flown AA more if they had made me CK, but that was their decision.