[miki123211]

This is like saying that movie theaters make money on popcorn, so they should just start selling popcorn and exit the movie business entirely. The reason those loyalty programs work is because of the flights.

For a much deeper dive on this, see https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/gary-leff-fre...

(there's a well-formatted text transcript)

[antasvara]

I read it more as "you buy an airline because you want to run an airline, but what you actually end up running is primarily a credit card company." That doesn't mean you stop doing flights, it just means that the part you want to do is the part that loses your company money.

This sort of thing all the time when (for example) a movie lover opens a movie theater. Running a profitable movie theater is a lot less about movies and a lot more about maximizing concession revenue.

[an0malous]

The point still stands that a dependency on creating a profitable airline company is a credit card company