I welcome the idea of an airline giving serious attention to the nutritional specifications of these snacks.
It's as close to the Swiss Army Knife of rewards cards as it gets. It all comes down to simple math.
This whole miles-for-merchandise mini-movement is being forced onto the airlines by their own inability to make good on the promise of free award seats.
It is a mess in the offing. The whole situation is coming apart at the seams. From a consumer standpoint, it has to be very, very troubling.
I wouldn't worry about actually getting where I'm going, but I would count on there being a fairly high probability of my getting there later than anticipated.
The big issue is award availability. Whenever you have a capacity reduction, that inevitably translates directly into fewer award seats, and I have no doubt that will happen in this case.
Having a credit card associated with a frequent-flier program is a real money maker. Typically, airlines charge the credit-card company one or two cents for each mile issued. That can equate to millions of dollars.
If you had a ticket in hand, then there's a chance that another airline would honor that ticket. It would certainly be on a space-available basis and they'd probably charge a fee.
There is something deep in the human psyche that keeps people, myself included, in sort of a hoarding mode. You have to overcome that.
A lot of consumers use the term 'bait and switch' when they hear this.
