GUWonder

OMNI’s a window into what kind of people there are in the world. No worse than Facebook.

Astrophsx

Looks like Monkey Miles is just making up fictional places for his articles now.

gpeso8

LOL. Thanks, that honestly made me chuckle for the first time today.

Astrophsx

Hard to set the bar any lower than the points of life. His coverage of Peruvian food:

On the other hand, the ceviche lived up to the hype and the pizza was not meh. The nachos were some of the best I’ve ever.

Adam1222

Randy hand-selected that. Only the best.

Astrophsx

Here is another golden nugget:

"Alpaca tastes like church. Guinea pig tastes like chicken. Cerveza tastes like beer."

http://thepointsoflife.boardingarea....cusco-edition/

cruisr

Just when you think the quality of writing on BA can’t go any lower....
BA never disappoints when it comes to the garbage blogs that it offers. The good blogs are outnumbered by the bad and it’s not worth the effort to find the good ones. I stick with Frequent Miler and Wandering Aramean.

nineworldseries

Not just hard, but impossible to set the bar lower than Points of Life. He makes other completely incompetent, awful blogs look well-written by comparison.

84fiero

True, although it might be close to a toss-up between TPOL and "Renes Points"

GUWonder

It's a sign of the times. As the airline "loyalty" programs become an even more extreme shell game to fleece consumers and have less and less value to provide their members, those covering these programs have less useful material to provide for their reading audience members.

I expect the quality and utility of the blogs in this space won't be making massive improvements in general as the blogs' historical market has less to gain from these programs than they used to have to gain.

Adam1222

Maybe. But maybe this has causation confused as it's not clear these garbage blogs ever had anything to do with high value mileage programs. Blogs proliferated because of the growth of credit card marketing profiteering, encouraged by people like Randy, with no relationship to the actual value of frequent flier programs. Quantity over quality, blogs by people who have never leftthe lower 48 except one time using miles from a credit card signup, etc.
The credit card marketing model and the blogs pushing it to the masses who will never be frequent fliers is a factor in the devaluation of mileage programs, not vice versa . Some bloggers have made a living off of selling credit cards and helped kill the benefits of frequent flying.

GUWonder

The lower ("less-interesting-of-a-daily-read-to-me") quality blogs have in the main only gotten worse over time as the programs became less valuable for consumers.

The massive devaluation hits customers have faced from the airline mileage programs in the US aren't due to the credit-card issuers and the blogs covering the credit-card issuers in the space. Those devaluations are caused by the US3 airline cartel kingpins and rooted in the USG-granted allowances given to the US3 airlines; and they've unleashed an infection that is undermining the value that consumers get from non-US airline mileage programs too.

Blaming bloggers and credit card issuers for the massive program devaluations is akin to putting the cart before the horse and punishing the cart for horse being a bad horse.

Adam1222

You have your hypothesis, I have mine. Unfortunately, there is no good methodological way of analyzing whether the growth of "churning" and pushing "Fly for freeeeee" on a larger audience, who mostly consisted of non-value customers, actually played a role in airlines' decision that the economic benefits of loyalty did not justify the cost of generous mileage programs.

As one article explained, "The purpose of a frequent-flier program is to build loyalty and retain customers who generate a lot of profits. Mileage runners aim to buy tickets with the lowest cost per mile and extract as many points as possible from them; this is not high-margin behavior the airlines want to encourage. And increasingly, they aren’t."


Unless you were involved in the decisionmaking of each program, you also have no basis for insisting how wrong I am.

84fiero

True, it is getting to be more and more slim pickings in the loyalty world which is impacting everyone. Though Delta/Renes Points and TPOL have been poor quality from the start.

GUWonder

Bloggers and credit card issuers in the US3 airline program space aren’t in the driver’s seat for the massive devaluation decision-making of any of the US3 airline programs.