4am in a hotel in Sheung Wan, Hong Kong. I reach for my phone to check whether a waitlisted upgrade has cleared. The seat assignment has changed to 2A. A moment of delight — and then I notice the flight status says approximately five hours remaining.

The flight departed just after midnight. I thought I was flying out the following evening.

The scramble was immediate. Calling the airline’s US support number because time zones meant the European lines weren’t fully staffed, simultaneously queueing for Europe, pulling up Google Flights where the cheapest rerouting turned out to be Aeroflot via Moscow. When I got through to the European line, the agent cited the rules: already checked in, no changes allowed. A pause while Moscow became a real possibility. Then: “Those are the rules. But we can always make exceptions. Let me see how we should handle this.” A few minutes later I was rebooked on the flight I’d thought I was taking. Upgrade voucher transferred, first on the waitlist. Business class was still wide open. It cleared the next evening at the gate.

That phone call is what loyalty actually looked like. Not the champagne — free champagne is nice, even if it’s not really free once you account for the revenue spent and the hours you’ve sat at ten kilometers of altitude. The real value of status was resilience. When you fly frequently enough, things go wrong at a rate that makes disruption a statistical certainty: missed connections, weather cancellations, the occasional volcano stranding you somewhere unplanned. Status meant the airline would be flexible with you. Not because you were important, but because you were known.

What I love about travel isn’t novelty. It’s the opposite. Landing somewhere and feeling the comfort of familiarity. Aviation gossip with the bartender at Heathrow T3. The BA lounge manager in San Francisco who remembered where you’d flown the week before and asked where you were heading next. Running into a friend at a lounge, each on the way somewhere else, sharing a drink before moving on. When places become familiar, travel stops being tourism and starts being a life.

The first phase was corporate — running globally distributed teams, flying economy on budgets already cut back from what the generation before had enjoyed. A long haul followed by an immediate transcon became the norm. Crossing the Pacific became routine, and I never stopped enjoying the impossibly long day you get crossing the date line from east to west. The loyalty program was infrastructure: it bridged the gap between what my employer would pay for and what my body needed to sustain that schedule. Its real currency was the phone call from Sheung Wan — the airline working with you when things broke.

When the heavy corporate travel ended, the program became something else. A hobby. The game shifted from accumulating status through volume to finding sweetspots where the points-to-spend ratio was disproportionately generous. One year, flights to the Gulf qualified. I’d never spent much time in that part of the world, so over two years I explored the peninsula: Oman, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain. Then the sweetspot moved to Oceania, and I found myself revisiting New Zealand after two decades, hopping over to Australia on a weekend to see friends who’d settled there. The loyalty program was generating exploration I’d never have chosen on my own. The constraint was generative.

I maintained top-tier status with the same alliance for well over a decade. Then the programs shifted to revenue-based qualification, and the math stopped working. The spend required to hold status was something I couldn’t justify, and the sweetspot game, chasing points to places I’d never have thought to visit, was over. I’m gliding away. Soft landings between tiers, each one a step down, until the final remnants of that era are gone.

Albert O. Hirschman described this mechanism in 1970. In Exit, Voice, and Loyalty he argued that loyalty serves a specific structural function: it delays exit. When customers are loyal to a firm, they don’t leave at the first sign of decline. They stay, and because they stay, they use voice — they complain, push back, demand better. Voice is how an organization learns what’s failing while there’s still time to fix it.

Remove the loyalty, and the most committed customers don’t complain. They just leave. Quietly. The organization loses both their revenue and the only signal that could have told it what went wrong. The book is over half a century old. The mechanism it describes is still being ignored.

Frequency-based loyalty programs were manufactured loyalty in Hirschman’s sense. And they worked. Status created a structural reason to stay. It gave you voice: the ability to call and be heard, to get the exception when the rules said no. Revenue-based programs dismantled this for exactly the travelers the system was built to serve. I was in the market for a six-hundred-dollar economy ticket, for which I was willing to pay nine hundred because the loyalty carried value. That premium is gone. The passenger buying a four-thousand-dollar business class seat already gets every perk the loyalty program offers: the cabin, the lounge, the priority boarding. Loyalty adds nothing for them. They’ll shop on hard product and price, flight by flight.

Maybe the airlines are right. Post-Covid, leisure demand surged. A new generation of travelers is entering the market. Perhaps old fossils like me are the acceptable cost of a more rational system. But I can’t escape the sense that this is people optimizing a number without understanding the system the number represents. Revenue per loyalty member goes up when you redefine loyalty as revenue. The dashboard improves. Whether anyone is actually loyal is a question the dashboard doesn’t ask.

The new world isn’t all loss. There are airlines I’ve never tried, products I haven’t sampled. I can take whatever routing makes sense for a given trip without worrying whether the miles land in the right program. I’m spending less than I was when loyalty dictated my choices. Narrowly, I’m optimizing better now than I have in years.

But I’m not complaining to anyone about it. I’m not posting on forums or writing angry letters. I’m just gliding away — soft landings between tiers, each one a step closer to the exit — and Hirschman would recognize the pattern. The most loyal customers don’t use voice when the deal finally breaks. They just leave. The airline will register a membership lapsing, one number in a database trending the way the models probably predicted. What it won’t show is what that number contained: almost two decades of routed travel, Gulf states explored because the points worked out, a phone call from a hotel in Sheung Wan at four in the morning. A woman who said we can always make exceptions.