How Airlines Quietly Became Banks

One of my favorite YouTube videos on this subject: ▶ this video Key point: airlines are more powerful than normal banks - they are central banks, with complete control of the money (point) supply. On the trilemma [0], they chose to control the exchange rate (points to flight value) and have an independent monetary policy (how many points to issue to flyers or other buyers). [0] link

Fundamental problem: Flights don't make money. Airlines actually make all of their money through loyalty programs and credit card payments. They basically should have turned into regulated utilities long ago, but loyalty program revenue saved them. Unless this initiative will turn into a credit card company (which nobody likes or wants to do) it won't go anywhere Private equity will likely sell the company for parts. There is no operational improvements for cash flow that they can do. Useful watch (skip to 2:20): ▶ this video

> how the major airlines now are more of a "bank that happens to have planes" Here is a decent video explaining it ▶ this video

Wendover Productions had a good video about this, framed around United getting a loan during the pandemic: ▶ this video

Wendover Productions has a video on how airlines are banks now. Their Loyalty Programs are worth several times more than the Airlines and flying is basically a secondary business for them. How Airlines Quietly Became Banks ▶ this video

On average yes, but for savvy people they are worth much more for biz/first class travel. There is even a whole industry built around mileage booking. Why subsidize? There is no subsidize at all, an empty seat on a flight is an empty seat unsold, any money they can make back is extra profit. Airlines do not make money by flying people nowadays, but by selling miles in bulk to banks [0]. [0]: ▶ this video

There's a YouTube video that talks about how valuable the major US airlines reward program is. The market cap of each airline is less than the value of each airline's reward program at the time the video was made. I recall Apple was valued in a similar manner back in the late 1990s. Their market cap was barely more than cash on hand. Talk about missed investing opportunities... Not that I'm saying airlines are the next AAPL. edit - here's the video - "How Airlines Quietly Became Banks" - ▶ this video

It's not just time-value. It's also not just tying/advertising (although it is some of that - if I'm getting a ton of "free" points to American, I'm more likely to fly with them). It's both of those, and so much more. Loyalty points work like gift cards in that huge numbers of them go unredeemed for any value, so selling them is just printing money. And unlike gift cards, which are typically denominated in currency, airline points don't have a fixed exchange rate to USD, so the airline can sell them to Chase or whatever for $0.01, and then if it needs to rebalance the books to shed the outstanding liability it can easily adjust the point costs of flights to make them only worth $0.009 - it's the same as a price hike, but in a way that's less noticeable to most customers most of the time. And that's assuming they don't just sell the points at an outright profit to begin with. You can find a number of analyses showing that airlines operate at a loss if you set aside the miles-economy revenue streams. United famously got a line of credit secured against their loyalty program in 2020, in which they and their creditors valued the loyalty program at more than the value of the entire company of United Airlines - which would naively imply that the actual airline, the part of the company that owns large expensive machines and actually sells a product to consumers, had negative value. Here's a longer overview with numbers and sources - ▶ this video

This is actually a huge part of a modern airline's business. There's an interesting Wendover video[1] that argues the airline operations of the legacy carriers is just a loss-leader for their financial functions like credit cards, points partners, etc. United (my home airline) recently adjusted their frequent flier system to basically stop anyone without a credit card or tons of business travel from getting status. Looks like Southwest wanted a piece of that pie. [1] ▶ this video

Interesting, I watched a video about this topic a while back[0]. I don't remember it exploring the larger impacts related to government and such but instead digs into how exactly airlines make money from this system. [0] ▶ this video

One thing that has changed in the airline industry that wasn't the case when the points guy started, is that the Airline Frequent flier miles are worth more than the actual airline themselves making the airlines essentially banks. ▶ this video

It obviously causes them harm. The points are often redeemed at a discount to their regular tickets... which are often loss leaders for their points business. Most airlines lose money on every ticket, and make it up in their rewards programs. Only to lose money again on redemption. They really only make money on some of the inefficiencies.. Easy to follow source: ▶ this video