It depends on the length of the cruise. From RCL site:
RCL Shareholder benefit page

Nice find! I was thinking of something like that, though 10% might be a lot.

Companies could either issue new shares or they could buy back shares from the market (which is, in a manner of speaking, a silent dividend). They could issue similar things as shares, there are several variations on the topic out there. :-)

The shares (or similar papers) could be handed out in a competition: "Our 1.000 top mileage accruers this year will receive..." Or a more long-term loyalty approach might be another idea: "If you fly with us every quarter for 5 consecutive years, you'll get...." Or a simple draw: "For every mile in your account you will have one ticket in the raffle..."

The shares/papers could be available for purchase for miles (someone mentioned that already). Reminds me of http://www.gwei.org :-)

Or there could be "virtual" shares that don't give you real ownership and don't give you cash dividends but dividends in miles. The more profit the airline makes, the more miles you will receive. (Then again not many airlines pay dividends, so this might limit itself.)

Of course, giving miles to shareholders (if they are natural persons) would be another interesting idea.

Yes, there might be tax issues in the US and some other jurisdictions, but the same is true for miles in the first place (ask the Germans). And airlines exist in most countries, so there might be countries where such a program might not be too difficult to pull off.

The airline could cooperate with one online broker only ("If you open an account with Hobo Booby Trading (Senchen) Inc, you will receive...) thus entering a marketing cooperation with them, earning commissions AND strengthening the emotional tie with frequent passengers. Legally, the shares could be awarded by the online broker and not the airline, if that makes it easier for the airline.

Many banks have "reward points" programmes where you can use points to buy investment products or pay back loans. So I don't see why an airline-broker-tandem couldn't come up with some clever scheme. :-)

For Carnival Corporation brands, see http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix....l-sharebenefit. We've pocketed $500 in credit so far since buying the shares, with another $50+�50 for next year's booked cruises. Plus, the stock earns dividends.

Well, yes and no. I though about that for a while. The company that runs the Customer Retention Program/Frequent Flyer Program/Miles Scheme has to put money aside for miles earned by customers anyway. (Would that be what they call "Provisions" in IFRS?) Because, some day, some miles will be used for something which costs money. (One of the reasons why miles expire is to limit this stack of horded money.) That way, you probably get some high value mileage millionaires to become share holders, and not John onceayearholidayflightineconomywithchildren Doe.

Instead of retaining the money for this future expense, the same amount of money could be labelled as retained earnings and thus become new equity. New shares would, at max, reflect this added equity (probably less).

So the relation share<=>equity would not become worse (and most likely even better). However, there is usually some "phantasy" in a share, so a share of a company is often more worth than the according fraction of the equity. So javacodeguy is not completely wrong: A system like that might delute the value of previous share holders.

Then again, if the system is successful, the airline will become more profitable than without this system, increasing the value of each share.

So real life calculations by an expert in this field would be interesting to read. :-)

I see many possible variations on the topic: For example, when an airline needs to raise new equity: They could invite some of their frequent flyers to buy equity with miles. We all know that certain miles have a certain internal value, so that wouldn't be too difficult.

Another possibility would be an auction of shares or stock options for miles: "One bid sealed auction. We have 100.000 shares to give away. How many do you want (max 1.000), how many miles do you bid per share? We will distribute the shares in a way that maximises our profit. T&C apply. Your broker might charge extra fees to add these shares to your portfolio."

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