kapooncha

"The End" doesn't necessarily have to literally mean the end, if you catch my drift. I wasn't doing this back in 2007 but I imagine this whole hobby was extremely lucrative back then. Now, not nearly as much, and with the rules the banks have put in place, it's become exponentially more difficult.

In a few years, you may find that F awards cost upwards of 300,000 miles one way. So that's not literally "the end" but it basically is the end.

Productivity

I'll be honest, from a selfish point of view I'd be quite happy to see the big sign up bonuses die or at least get clamped down. They were always distorting the market and they created a lot of competition for premium seats - I'd be happy to see them go.

If that happened and it managed to take down some of the bloggers as well, I wouldn't shed a tear. Don't think many of them add much value to the conversation these days.

84fiero

^^

3Cforme

AA, DL and UA (in their annual reports) have all acknowledged they sell more miles than they award through their own flying. That's not to say those sold miles are all credit card bonuses. There are plenty of sources of mile issue inflation.

Boraxo

Outstanding! And yes this has been a popular refrain for a long time.

As one who has been in the game from the beginning (or fairly close - I redeemed one of my first reward tickets on PSA, in 1986) I can honestly say that the game is always changing, and usually not to benefit the customer.

• In the 1990s it was easy to get elite upgrades at the lowest status levels (as a United 2P, no less) and the award pricing was great (e.g. DL 75k award for 2 F tickets to Hawaii - with lots of inventory). But credit card signup bonuses were pretty weak.
• In the 2000s the hotel programs really started to shine with Hyatt FFN awards (stay 2 nights, get 1 free). The 9/11 tragedy also brought some stellar deals as airlines sought to get people flying again (think AA's "Fly 2 trips, get a free ticket anywhere we fly"). There were also a number of mistake fares that were honored and largely flew under the radar because there were fewer bloggers and no twitter.
• In late 2000s everyone blogger with a heartbeat jumped on the churning bandwagon as credit card signup bonuses spiked and there were no limits on how many times you could get a bonus (well except for your credit score).
• After 2008 recession, programs have been gradually dialing back the perks as airplane seats and hotel rooms are near capacity. Elite benefits are plummeting.
• Over past 3 years banks have finally started to address churning and eliminated most opportunities. It is not clear to me why they did not do this 10 years ago, but maybe there was still profit from these transactions due to their relationships with travel providers. In any case, the bonuses remain high, but generally for new customers or new products.

In sum, the headline is just silly - travel rewards are here to stay. Bank bonuses for cards are here to stay. Gaming the system is getting tougher. As for elite perks and constant inflation of award levels, that will only stop when business plummets in the next recession.

GUWonder

Credit card bonuses didn't cause the rampant inflation in mileage awards. The strong economic demand for regular paid tickets, reduced competition of sorts, and/or greedy airline corporations are the mix in what drove the rampant inflation of mileage awards. And it's the same kind of dynamic in the hotel awards sector.

Extreme devaluations in mileage awards have happened even for mileage programs where credit card bonuses have been miserly or nowhere near as widely popular as they have been with US airline programs.

pinniped

One huge change that has impacted me - both positively and negatively - is that airlines now actually try to sell their F/J seats to individual buyers on many routes.

In the 90's, it was almost exclusively corporate buyers + upgraders. Airlines would price the seats astronomically high and then give corp discounts of 40-50% if not more. (I know some of my J tickets for work in the 90's, ex-ORD on AA, were 45% off list price.) Since the corporate travel didn't fill every seat, and you could kind of predict when it wouldn't fill the seats, the upgrade game was quite a bit better.

Now, airlines have realized that individuals will buy the seats and pay a profitable premium for them. They can use a few simple fare rules (advance purchase, nonrefundable, etc.) to firewall the individuals from the corporate buyers and collect a lot of revenue from the seats without cannibalizing the full-J sales.

The positive angle, for me, is that now I've actually bought a few J and F tickets for leisure trips. Trips where the total F/J airfare is equal to the cheapest coach seat + an "upgrade fee" I find reasonable for the product. The negative angle, of course, is that awards are often a lot harder to find...

sdsearch

They did start to do it over 10 years ago. Over 10 years ago, you could apply for 2 identical AA cards from Citi on the same day, every 3 months. That speed of it ended more than 10 years ago, and CandymanJim's thread about not-the-first-Citi-limitaton is famous among those of us where doing that back then and talking about it on FT:

Citibank - the jig is up...

So they didn't start to address churning only 3 years ago, it's just that they greatly ramped up their anti-churning efforts in the past 3 years.

For another example, Chase's 24 month wait since you earned the last bonus was an anti-churning step that originated many years ago. It was just not nearly as big an anti-churning step as 5/24 which came more recently.

GUWonder

Yes, and yet the airlines have had a tendency to increase the price of long-haul premium cabin award travel by very large amounts even as the spread between regular paid ticket prices for economy class and discounted premium cabin seat prices during sales has narrowed greatly. Couple the dynamic of higher premium cabin award travel prices with a lower cost to buy-up in cash from economy class to premium cabin space on long-haul flights and the value of the frequent flyer programs drops further yet. No wonder cash-back cards and credit card program points applicable toward regular paid tickets across a wide variety of airlines have been growing in popularity.

pinniped

It's all part of the drive towards a future when even Flyertalkers are back to looking for value in their miles through short cheap coach tickets. As the J/F awards get taken off the board, that's what's left. Since airline advertising to the masses is always expressed in terms of these flights, they'll probably still be there.

I recently redeemed 5,500 miles for a $120 one-way DL ticket and got excited about it. I know there's no way my limited stash of DL miles will ever get me into a long-haul J seat.

My best stash for long-haul J is AS, and I figure I've got one more big redemption left...once the merger dust fully settles, they'll probably gut that program too.

kapooncha

Is there anyone here who would fly coach from USA to Asia? I know I wouldn't. I've been fortunate enough to travel out there quite a bit, mainly through being able to cash in miles for J and/or F awards. There is no way I'm going to fly coach all the way out there. Plenty of really nice trips I can take here in the USA.

Boraxo

strickerj

mia

Perhaps this is one reason that we now see no-annual-fee AA and DL cards that earn 1 mile per dollar, and free (or low fee) cards that earn more than one transferrable point per dollar? Think of award tickets in terms of the amount of spending required for a ticket, rather than the number of miles.

GUWonder

And think of award tickets in terms of the amount of spending required for a ticket, rather than the number of miles gotten from flying or spending. This is the exact reason why I wouldn't use an AA or UA or DL co-branded card for most of my spending and why I increasingly have dismissed the airline loyalty programs as a factor in deciding which, if any, of the US3 airlines to use for domestic or international travel. The US3 airline industry cartel kingpins have brought this upon themselves. If Chase, Citi and Amex move too much in the direction of repeating what the US3 airline industry cartel kingpins have done to the FFPs, cash-back will become the undisputed champion for me.