The Frequent Flyer Program (FFP) emerged as airlines competed to differentiate their brands and retain customer loyalty. The FFP bestowed airlines unprecedented access and insight to their customers, and it also ignited the aspirational imaginations of their passengers through elite status and accruable currencies for future free flights. With the advent of cross-marketing channels via credit card companies and banks in the early 90s, what was once purely a cost center in its earliest incarnations, the FFP, has developed into a profitable revenue channel behind any global airline operation.
Yet, the “value” of a mile is often shaped by whims and corporate fiat. How American Airlines managed the incredible art of profit through its FFP while losing money transporting passengers in FY2019 attests to public fillings during the COVID-19 pandemic that have revealed internal valuations of FFPs as outsized to market caps of the airlines. Meanwhile, the “value” of a mile to a consumer continues to shift as airlines also unilaterally adjust their liabilities through FFP mechanics.
Using GIS and critical cartography, I argue that the historical “value” of a mile is deliberately subjective and a product of spatial ontologies and cartographic manipulations that were embedded in redemption award charts of FFPs. This has enabled contemporary forms of the FFPs to be predicated on dangerous speculation and easy manipulations, leading to deliberately delayed and oft-unfulfilled “futurities” of a mile. Not dissimilar to contemporary anxieties about invented currencies and their effects on states and markets, the innovation of FFPs and the shifting values of mileage currencies may also pose systemic risk to airlines, consumers, and the financial system.