New airline math: How your points and miles are shaping where your favorite carrier flies
For decades, airlines have relied on cold, hard math before deciding to fly to a new city.
How many seats will they sell? How many other airlines are they up against? Will it be profitable? Spreadsheets. Number-crunching. Projections.
Yet, in an age where data seems to rule everything — from a football team's playsheet to your social media feed — some airlines say they're planning certain flights based on a far less scientific calculation.
More than ever before, airline executives aren't just weighing where consumers and businesses will spend their cash to fly.
They're pondering which destination will inspire their most loyal customers to earn (and redeem) their points and miles ... and maybe pick up a credit card in the process.
That way of thinking has given points, miles and loyalty a proverbial seat at the table as airline executives decide where to send their most precious commodities: their airplanes.
Picking the place loyalty members want to go (with their points and miles)
Take United Airlines.
In 2019, the carrier launched America's first nonstop service to Cape Town. At the time, the airline had little concrete data to justify the 14-hour journey, executives would later claim.
But in the eyes of Patrick Quayle — the man who decides where United flies — the gamble paid off.
"By adding that, we got this unique kind of view into ... what our passengers wanted," Quayle told me last year. "And we started experimenting."
If you've followed United's globe-trotting in recent years, you're familiar with the experiments: Dubrovnik, Croatia; Palermo, Italy; Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Adelaide, Australia; Marrakech, Morocco.
Last year brought one of the boldest tests of all: flights from the U.S. to Nuuk, Greenland.
The move made a huge splash that, from United's standpoint, justified whatever business gamble might have existed in sending two planes a week to the Arctic for the summer.
"Its impact on our system will be small," Chief Commercial Officer Andrew Nocella assured Wall Street ahead of the launch. "But its impact on United, on our brand, customer profile, sign-ups for MileagePlus, will be great."
In other words, giving United's loyalty members a bucket-list destination reachable with its miles wasn't merely a side benefit of its flights to Nuuk. On this route, at least, it was a priority.
Not just a United tactic
United is not alone. Other carriers are increasingly putting loyalty, points and award redemptions at the forefront when deciding where to fly.
Delta Air Lines, for one, recently let its SkyMiles loyalty program members vote on which new European destination(s) the carrier should add in 2026. Flights to the winning places — Sardinia, Italy, and Malta — begin this spring.
And then there's Southwest Airlines, which this month made St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands its first new city in half a decade. More — including St. Maarten; Hilo, Hawaii; and Anchorage, Alaska — are coming.
All of these are destinations that once would've been hard to imagine for an airline that historically focused on the continental U.S.
Why the shift?
"We see people want to go there. It's aspirational. They want to redeem points for those destinations," Tony Roach, Southwest's chief customer and brand officer, told me in October, explaining the airline's thinking.
JetBlue similarly had points on its mind when it partnered with far larger United last year on the two airlines' new "Blue Sky" alliance.
The New York-based carrier was hoping to give its TrueBlue loyalty members more reason to care about its award currency by offering up redemptions — on United planes — to the many cities and continents its jets can't reach.
"I think the utility of a TrueBlue point has skyrocketed," JetBlue President Marty St. George proclaimed last month.
The booming business of points, miles and credit cards
For longtime industry insiders, injecting so much talk about loyalty and mileage redemptions into once sterile and scientific discussions about route maps is a notable shift.
"Traditionally, airline route planning has been overwhelmingly demand-led," said Ahmed Abdelghany, former United executive and current dean at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. "It shows that loyalty programs are no longer just marketing tools. They are core business engines."
You can say that again.
Leaning into a lucrative part of the business
Loyalty programs and the credit cards that supercharge them are multibillion-dollar businesses for the largest carriers.
For some airlines, loyalty is a more profitable arm of the business than flying planes.
Last year, Delta made $8 billion just off its partnership with American Express — an eye-popping number its competitors are clamoring to inch closer to.
Recent years have seen carriers racing to turn casual customers into loyalty members with perks like free-to-members inflight Wi-Fi — while dangling lounge access and shortcuts to elite status as a carrot for would-be cardholders.
But ultimately, these are airlines we're talking about. And few perks make a carrier, its miles or its card portfolio stand out quite like flights to the places customers want to fly.
Connect those dots, and it's not hard to see the logic behind some of the alluring — if less traditional — routes we've seen debut in recent years.
The science behind it all isn't going away
To be clear, airlines remain highly analytical in how they plan routes; we're not talking about adding flights to a "Cast Away"-esque island on a whim.
In fact, given the rise of artificial intelligence, I'd only expect companies to lean harder into hard data when deciding where to put planes.
That includes reams of data on customers themselves — and their travel habits — which makes flying to even the most obscure places more of a calculated risk than a shot in the dark.
"The most successful airlines will be the ones that blend both worlds: using data-driven demand models and loyalty value metrics together," Abdelghany told me. "Rather than replacing one with the other."
Not a slam dunk
We should also note: Not all of these gambles pay off.
Look no further than United's ill-fated flights to Bergen, Norway or Dakar, Senegal — the latter of which launched last year but won't return in 2026.
That's part of experimenting, United CEO Scott Kirby has made clear.
"You build a hotel in Nuuk, you're kind of stuck," he quipped at an industry conference last summer. "You fly a flight to Nuuk and it doesn't work, you don't fly it next season."
As it happens, United will be back in Greenland's capital come June — right as it adds new pins on its route map in Spain, Italy and Croatia.
And in a world where airlines are fervently competing for a slice of your attention, loyalty and wallet, expect carriers to add more head-turning destinations in the years to come.