SkyMiles and Reward programs: profitable customer

In short, SkyMiles is no longer a frequent-flier program; it’s a big-spender program.

This is probably how frequent-flier programs should have been run in the first place. Airline don’t care that you fly alot, they care that you are a profitable customer.

That means business customers and the wealthy will still be their main clients. This just means they lose the churners and the price sensitive bargain hunters, which almost every airline would be happy to trade away for more business customers.

It’s a win for the airline as they keep their core customers happy as their rewards won’t change and they’ll lose the unprofitable customers who used their rewards programs alot without spending much.

> A 2020 analysis by the Financial Times found that Wall Street lenders valued the major airlines’ mileage programs more highly than the airlines themselves. United’s MileagePlus program, for example, was valued at $22 billion, while the company’s market cap at the time was only $10.6 billion.

This looks alot like car companies whose leasing arms became more profitable than their manufacturing arms for part of the 2000s.

But wallstreet loves companies that they can easily value and this “conglomerate” style business has been out of favour for a while now.

Sooner or later some airlines will spin out their rewards business into a separate company to get the maximum valuation from it. Just like how deregulation lead to the consolidation of airlines, I wouldn’t be surprised to see only a couple of rewards programs that every airline uses in a decade.

As usual PE will be the winner. I’d bet Blackstone or Apollo will roll up multiple programs into one or two uber rewards/credit card programs that are spun out into public companies. VISA and Mastercard won’t care who owns them. As long as it drives more credit card usage, they’ll be on board.