Tag Archives for the points guy.
The FAA is calling out Brian Kelly (‘The Points Guy’) who sold his eponymous website years ago, and no longer manages it, but still represents them in media. He blamed summer 2023 flight delays on FAA staffing, but the FAA points out that weather is a bigger cause of delays.
The FAA also calls out volume of flights and runway capacity as bigger issues with delays than staffing, though this is misleading.
A Cardless co-founder was a TPG intern 7 years ago, so the relationship isn’t surprising. Still, this strikes me for two reasons.
Banks are spending billions of dollars to gain access to customers, and to convince those customers to run their spend through the bank’s products. However this strategy is difficult.
It can be a more fruitful strategy to fish for customers in new ponds. And we’ve seen a lot of that. Chase used to see small portfolios and feel they wouldn’t move the needle enough. Now they’re doing DoorDash, Instacart, and Air Canada Aeroplan’s U.S. co-brand.
American Airlines is suing The Points Guy over its app that tracks account balances, scraping data from the AA.com website.
TPG isn’t on the side of angels here, they’re both fighting over consumer eyeballs, but the service that others like TPG are providing can be a net positive. And unquestionably companies have taken enforcement of computer access laws way too far.
What American should have done was insist on a stake in the product. Award Wallet, for instance, has hundreds of thousands of airline elite customers in their database….. including the customers of American’s competitors. The smart move would be to market to those competitors’ customers, negotiated in exchange for access.
American Airlines has been clamping down on websites that work with AAdvantage member data for their customers. They made Award Wallet stop tracking member accounts and they sent a cease and desist letter to Red Ventures, which owns The Points Guy, over its TPG app which – among other things – lets customers track their frequent flyer program balances.
American sought to stop the practice, and so Red Ventures first sued American Airlines seeking declaratory relief. And now American Airlines and its loyalty subsidiary have countersued in the Northern District of Texas.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
