"Boarding Area: Required Reading for Frequent Fliers"

I'm speechless.

Gary won't believe what happens next!




(Readership drops)

Think he knows about:

This One Strange Trick to Increase Blog Readership?

And another headline about passengers lotioning each other.

I stand my my earlier assertion. ;)

Lets stick to the topic. 7 OT personal comments deleted.

Regards Oliver2002
Mod EM&PR forum

Is there any way to tie in such VFTW items into credit card referral revenue? Those kind of non-miles and points articles just can't keep my eyeballs long enough to check out everything there.

Since posting frequency and traffic are positively correlated, I would view all this as an, um, naked play for traffic. Higher traffic, in turn, can be used to market a blog to potential advertisers and should theoretically also translate into a few more card conversions. Or at least that's how I think it works.

Nothing but click bait for over a week. Absolutely nothing useful re: hotels, airlines, mileage, etc. Just oddball news clips.

Kind of where the world of miles/points is right now. Harder to push cards with the CC companies limiting churning and airline/hotel programs eliminating sweet spots. And cheap and easy MSing falling by the wayside. If not for Ben's trip reports (about the same or similar places/hotels/premium cabins/airline lounges), there'd be little new content at OMaaT.

When you've established a pattern of several posts per day, every day, it's hard to stop. And since I don't think much of his analysis of the operation of the airline and hotel industries, as opposed to their loyalty programs, I don't think there's much content out there for him that offers value to readers other than to talk about things like Susan Boyle freaking out in a BA lounge. It also seems that there are fewer "hey, I was in the New York Times" type articles or articles that mention information that is "exclusive" to him from his contacts at American Airlines and American Express.

I believe GTL's frequent assertions that he blogs because of his love of travel will again be more and more true to the detriment of his bottom line--at least until the executive suites at the loyalty programs/CC companies change with the emphasis swinging back to valuing sheer numbers of new accounts over the profitability of account holders. And even there, the CC companies have become more sophisticated about "screening" applicants by requiring high spend to achieve full bonuses.

Really? Why? People post in spurts on FT all the time.

With CC revenue failing, it's back to ad views. @:-)

There's such as thing as eating your seed corn. VFTW has brand value, and he's diminishing that value foolishly IMHO. Better to forego revenue today and keep the quality up for the long run.

OTOH, I would have written exactly the same thing before all the credit card pimping began. So what do I know?

I used to enjoy his trip reports a lot, before he changed his format, moved to Austin and became a thought leader. Likewise some of his food & restaurant pieces. Not much of any of that any more.

Hopefully after reading these posts he will up his game! ^