reward seats, who to be members and who not
 

Here is a article from Yahoo! about airline reward programs mainly dealing with reward seats/tickets

http://finance.yahoo.com/insurance/a...=family-travel

It shows the drastic differences between the airlines (10% to 99%) and how they treat their "loyal" customers

are they loyalty programs or just ways to brainwash people into flying their airline in the false beliefs that they are values/important

Excellent article, which shows just how fake these programmes are. The incentive programmes are simply a means of selling miles to other companies as "incentives", which makes the schemes profitable as long as not too many people redeem them.

The irony is that it is the low cost pro-consumer airlines such as JetBlue and SouthWest which beat out the established carriers, such as Delta and US Airways. These schemes are not worth it. The fees are often more than you can get the tickets for online. I would never join a US based frequent flyer programmes with a legacy carrier. They are a con pure and simple, and in any other industry the Attorney Generals office would have taken action against these scammers. Sadly, they are prohibited from doing so in law, following deregulation.

jim- I also stumbled in on another article in the Wall Street Journal (cant post it due to membership stuff) about the Obama administration announces panel to to study aviation issues such as competitiveness

and another where Delta and US Air are going to court to fight slots



here is an article on airlines and regulation (jim i think you'll like this one)
http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/13/news...n=money_latest

here is a quick article on southwest lobbying
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Southw....html?x=0&.v=1

Such hypocrites.. they are unbelievable. Especially Delta, which need to be broken up entirely.

I am an admirer of Southwest... it is one of the more customer friendly airlines.. but the amount airlines collectively spend on bribing or lobbying as they call it, tells you all you need to know about why the airlines seem to be immune from normal competitive pressures.