In a stunning revelatory article Sunday, The New York Times warned readers that airlines are emasculating their affinity programs: “Loyalty Programs: Playing the New Game.”
I immediately flashed on a Page One headline from 1978 when I was research director of The New York Times:
An Exotic Drug, ‘Cocaine,’ Appears Popular
The inside-journalism joke, of course, is that The Times is always a decade behind in its discovery of trends. The coke story appeared in “Not The New York Times,” a faux one-off newspaper published during the 1978 New York newspaper strike.
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| Executive Editor Abe Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb in the deserted New York Times newsroom during the 1978 strike. Photo By John Polich. Copyright (c) 1978, 2015 |
The Times management at the time, self-obsessed but not self-aware, did not laugh. The newspaper graciously renewed the joke in 2008 when an excellent piece by Jim Dwyer reminisced about the 30 year old phenomenon. His column, “In 1978, a Faux Paper Was Real Genius,” recalled other headlines:
Pope Dies Yet Again;
Reign is Briefest Ever
Cardinals Return from Airport
and
Insulating With Pate:
Winter Warmth
With Good Taste
To The Times credit, the loyalty story offers good advice to travelers on how to game what’s left of the goodwill once nurtured by the airlines, a withering trend that is, well, a decade old. The online title is a little more respectful to the travel industry than the print edition: “Making the Most of Evolving Airline and Hotel Reward Programs.”
Loyalty Programs have become the new "Where's Waldo". Somehow, the actual definition of loyalty: "the quality of being loyal to someone or something" makes all this even more confusing. Try being the consumer whose loyalty is tested on every flight from those with Elite status to those with no status.
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