✈️ What's the Deal with Airlines?
Destination: Bonus content.
🤠 Rapid Round Up
🛫 Sabrina made a video about airlines exploring all the turbulence the industry is facing. You can watch it here.
🪄 If you haven’t played Spellcheck 2.0, you can play the daily game right here! It’s been polished with human curation thanks to our friends at TED.
💥 Joe the Editor pondered the bizarre world of artificial b-roll in this video he made while working on our toothpaste video.
✨ Get your bonus content! Sabrina’s shared wallpapers and extended interviews with all the experts from the airlines video. Watch them with this month’s password: PLANE.
🎧 Mixtape by Melissa
Songs for the road
Here's a playlist for anyone whose mind may be may be stuck in the clouds and needs a gentle nudge to come back down to earth.
📢 Audience Participation
To Stream or Not to Stream
Sabrina made another website! This one helps you choose a streaming subscription based on whether it has what you actually want to watch.
Check it out at toomuchmedia.online.
This is part of a video about video streaming subscription. We want to know how you feel about them, so we made a survey:Please fill out this survey about how you navigate streaming subscriptions. It also has an optional section where you can give us feedback on the site.
🔓 Patreon Unlocked
Is Rihanna a blue-collar worker?
In this Patreon-exclusive podcast, we dive deep into the enduring, formative, literary masterpiece that is Work by Rihanna. If you say work enough times, is it labour?
If you want to support us on Patreon and get access to more bonus content and aftershows, the answer to this riddle (one word, all lowercase) works as a discount code for 15% off your first month of membership: “I have wings and a tail, but I’m not an animal. I have a nose but cannot smell. What am I?”
Code is valid until July 31, 2026. We’ll reveal the answer in a future newsletter.
✂️ Cut for Time
Airlines are Banks with a Sidegig
While working on the airline video, loyalty programs and travel credit cards kept coming up for a surprising reason: US-based airlines have quietly become banks.
That is a bit of an exaggeration, but here’s what you need to know.
Historically, airline loyalty programs gave points to people for their distance flown — this meant that you had to get on a plane to earn points.
Around 2014, airlines began changing their loyalty programs to give points to people for money spent. Importantly, this money didn’t need to be spent on flights directly. Other businesses like banks and hotels could purchase points from the airlines to give away to their customers.
This led to the rise in travel credit cards. There are two types:
Co-branded credit cards, where a specific airline partners with a specific financial institution to offer specific perks.
Premium travel credit cards, where a financial institution will offer points that can be used across different airlines and access a wider array of airport lounges. This increased flexibility comes with fees pushing $1,000 USD.
They’ll appeal to different kinds of travellers but ultimately, they both serve to reduce the demand volatility and pricing risk that plagues the airline industry. Points functionally “pre-sell” airline service — giving airlines cash to more flexibly navigate drops in demand or rising costs. This is why airlines are basically banks — customers hold their money in the airline (as points) until it is realized through travel or expires. And airlines control the terms. You may have heard a similar story about Starbucks.
This model dominates the US (and to a less extent Canada and Mexico) due to a unique mix of factors: a large population, high credit card use, and limited regulation of credit card “swipe fees.”
These fees are charged to a vendor when they accept a credit card (which can encourage more sales by keeping things convenient for the customer). The EU limits how high a swipe fee can be, the US doesn’t. This allows travel credit cards to charge higher swipe fees to pay for more competitive perks.
The problem is that those swipe fees trickle into the costs of everyday goods, regardless of whether you are collecting points with a travel credit card. This is why there are talks of regulating the credit card industry which might be great for consumers but spell the end of this arm of business for airlines.
🔦 Creator Spotlight by Taha
Anna Howard
Anna Howard’s video series, Wild Geese, is a relaxed stroll through a garden of ideas - exploring creativity and meaningful living. Anna treats big, complicated ideas with thoughtful, unpretentious consideration.
When life gets busy or overwhelming - there is always a Wild Geese episode for that. Enjoy!
🙏 Thank You
Thank you for subscribing and following our chaotic little journey - see ya next month!
from ur neighbourhood nerds,
Sabrina, Melissa, and Taha <3