[timr]

How are you going to deal with the fact that airlines don't want more people in the points world? (Or at least, they don't want people finding inexpensive redemptions, which cost them money.)

The fundamental reason that it's hard to find cheap redemptions is that the economic incentives are aligned against cheap redemptions existing in the first place. Airlines want the revenue stream from points to be as high as possible, and the redemption rate to be as low as possible.

[timqin]

So this is an interesting question because there isn't a clear cut answer. The airline industry is fragmented globally, there are tons of national carriers. And each airline team has different incentives.

Airlines, especially US airlines are making billions of dollars a year by selling points to credit card companies. So in theory, they actually want as many people in the world of points as possible because they a consistent high margin revenue from credit card companies.

I believe the real difference between airlines is how they balance loyalty redemptions vs. revenue sales. Airlines full control the pricing of the points redemptions, but they have to balance pricing with capacity and fixed costs. If the flight is only 50% full, then that points redemption is going to help amortize the large fixed costs of operating that half empty flight. So having a bargain points redemption rate, would look attractive.

Now, if that flight is 90% full, then the airline may not offer seats to redeem with points or raise the price to something extremely high like 200,000 points.

[timr]

> Airlines, especially US airlines are making billions of dollars a year by selling points to credit card companies. So in theory, they actually want as many people in the world of points as possible because they a consistent high margin revenue from credit card companies.

They want to sell as many points as possible, for as much as they can, and redeem them for as little as they can. (And in the middle, they want you to keep them as long as possible while they collect interest on the float while depreciating their value.)

> If the flight is only 50% full, then that points redemption is going to help amortize the large fixed costs of operating that half empty flight. So having a bargain points redemption rate, would look attractive. Now, if that flight is 90% full, then the airline may not offer seats to redeem with points or raise the price to something extremely high like 200,000 points.

I suspect the market for flight redemptions reflects this. The airlines would prefer that you can't redeem your points until the flight is absolutely unbookable by any more valuable means -- and for the airlines, essentially every form of cash booking is more valuable than points, since a "point" in your wallet means cash on their balance sheet. It's not in their interest to make cheap redemptions easy to find.

If I had to guess, the airlines that do early releases of award seats treat it as marketing expense. All things equal, they'd prefer that you have to hunt for them like truffles.

[timqin]

Yes, but it's a push and pull. Short term vs. long-term. If you devalue your points too much and make them too hard to redeem, then consumers won't want your miles.

Also, if airlines get too greedy with their points/miles, US government will step in to try and regulate and airlines certainly do not want that. (https://thepointsguy.com/news/congressional-investigation-ai...)

[timr]

I grant your point that there's an (intangible) limit to how much airlines can devalue their private currencies before people stop using them and/or they get regulated out of existence. It's just that this might come a good bit later than you can maintain a reasonable business providing transparency into their ecosystems.

I don't mean to be argumentative; this is a hard question. I only bring it up because you're probably going to hear it from investors. I assume you have an answer that you don't want to say publicly, which I respect.

[timqin]

No worries at all! I totally understand your point. We do have an answer for that based on our insights.

[borski]

The long term answer to this is easy: the airlines (really just Air Canada, and that will set a precedent) will lose this battle.

They will devalue points, change award charts, play the stupid cat and mouse game of trying to prevent scraping, but they will lose.

Even Southwest is giving up; they’re switching to assigned seats after many decades, because no amount of trying to prevent bots from checking you in has worked, long term, and checking in exactly at the minute and getting a C group number is infuriating. This isn’t a Taylor Swift concert; it’s a goddamn flight to JFK, lol.

[timr]

The airlines make up the fake currency, control its value, distribution, and ultimately, the entire consumer market for the currency. I don't know how you can conclude that they'll lose, when they run the entire game.

[borski]

Totally fair. I only meant they’d lose the battle against third-party searches, not that they’d lose money on the programs overall.