For decades, airlines have relied on cold math before deciding to fly to a new city.
How many seats will they sell? How many other airlines do they compete with? Will it be profitable? Spreadsheet. Number crunching. predict.
However, in an age where data seems to rule everything From football team schedules to social media feeds, some airlines say they are planning certain flights based on less scientific calculations.
Airline executives are more concerned than ever about where consumers and businesses will spend their money.
They’re considering which destination will inspire their most loyal customers to earn (and redeem) points and miles…and possibly get a credit card in the process.
This way of thinking gives points, miles and loyalty a proverbial seat at the table when airline executives decide where to fly their most precious commodity: their planes.
Choose where loyalty members want to go (using their points and miles)
Take United Airlines, for example.
In 2019, the airline launched the United States’ first nonstop service to Cape Town. Executives later claimed that at the time the airline had little concrete data to justify the 14-hour journey.
But for Patrick Quayle, who decides where United flies, the gamble paid off.
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“By adding this, we have a unique understanding of … passengers’ needs,” Quayle told me last year. “Then we started trying.”
If you’ve followed United’s journey around the world in recent years, you’ll be familiar with these experiments: Dubrovnik, Croatia; Palermo, Italy; Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Adelaide, Australia; and Marrakech, Morocco.
One of the boldest tests was carried out last year: a flight from the United States to Nuuk, Greenland.
The move caused a huge stir, and from United’s perspective, sending two planes a week to the Arctic for the summer made sense regardless of whether there was a commercial gamble or not.
“It will have a minimal impact on our systems,” Chief Commercial Officer Andrew Nocera assured Wall Street ahead of the release. “But the impact it will have on United, our brand, our customer profile, MileagePlus sign-ups will be huge.”
In other words, giving United’s loyalty members a wish-list destination they can reach with their miles is more than just a side benefit of its flights to Nuuk. At least on this route, it’s a priority.
It’s not just Manchester United’s tactics
Manchester United is not alone. Other airlines are increasingly prioritizing loyalty, points and rewards redemption when deciding where to fly.
For example, Delta Air Lines recently asked members of its SkyMiles loyalty program to vote on which new European destinations the airline should add in 2026. Flights to the winning destinations (Sardinia, Italy and Malta) will begin this spring.
Then there’s Southwest Airlines, which this month opened St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands as its first new city in five years. More — including St. Maarten; Hilo, Hawaii; and Anchorage, Alaska — are coming soon.
All of these destinations were once unimaginable for an airline historically focused on the continental United States.
Why change?
“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 had the same idea when it teamed up with much larger United Airlines last year to create a new “blue sky” alliance between the two airlines.
The New York-based airline hopes to give its TrueBlue loyalty members more reasons to care about its rewards currency by offering redemption services on United planes to many cities and continents its planes can’t reach.
“I think the utility of TrueBlue points has skyrocketed,” JetBlue President Marty St. George declared last month.
Points, miles and credit card business booming
For longtime industry insiders, injecting so much talk about loyalty and miles redemption into what was once a dry and scientific roadmap discussion is a notable shift.
“Traditionally, airline route planning has been overwhelmingly driven by demand,” said Ahmed Abdelghany, a former United executive and now dean of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “This shows that loyalty programs are no longer just marketing tools. They are core business engines.”
You can say it again.
Focus on lucrative business areas
For the largest operators, loyalty programs and the credit cards that add value to them are multi-billion dollar businesses.
For some airlines, loyalty is a more profitable business segment than flying planes.
Last year, Delta made $8 billion just through its partnership with American Express—a staggering figure that its competitors are clamoring to match.
In recent years, airlines have raced to convert casual customers into loyal members with perks such as free in-flight Wi-Fi, while also offering potential cardholders lounge access and shortcuts to elite status as bait.
But at the end of the day, we’re talking about airlines. Few perks set an airline, its miles or its credit card portfolio apart like flights to where customers want to go.
Connecting the dots, it’s not hard to see the logic behind some of the tantalizing (if less traditional) routes we’ve debuted in recent years.
The science behind it all isn’t going away
To be clear, airlines remain highly analytical when planning routes. We’re not talking about adding flights to “Cast Away”-style islands on a whim.
In fact, given the rise of artificial intelligence, I only hope companies will tilt Harder Hard data needs to be considered when deciding where to place aircraft.
This includes vast amounts of data about the customers themselves and their travel habits, making flying to even the most obscure of places more of a calculated risk than taking a blind risk.
“The most successful airlines will be those that blend both worlds: using both data-driven demand models and loyalty value metrics,” Abdulghani told me. “Rather than replacing one with the other.”
Not a slam dunk
We should also note: not all of these gambles will pay off.
Just look at United’s ill-fated flights to Bergen, Norway, or Dakar, Senegal—the latter started last year but won’t return in 2026.
United CEO Scott Kirby made it clear this was part of an experiment.
“If you build a hotel in Nuuk, you’re going to be in trouble,” he quipped at an industry conference last summer. “Your flight to Nuuk doesn’t work and you won’t be flying again next season.”
As it happens, Manchester United will In June we return to Greenland’s capital – as the company adds new markers to its route map in Spain, Italy and Croatia.
In a world where airlines compete fiercely for your attention, loyalty, and wallet, expect airlines to add more high-profile destinations in the coming years.
