Imagine taking a flight to Kansas City to see grandma, or a quick trip to Dallas to close a business deal you’ve been working months on, and instead of getting 1,200 Sky Miles on Delta or 800 miles on American Advantage, you instead get access to a little bit of bitcoin.
Just for taking the flight.
It’s what a new financial technology company called FlyCoin hopes to see as reality. They want to upend the model of frequent flyer programs by incorporating the principles used by cryptocurrencies.
So, instead of hooking a user up with some miles they can eventually turn into a free flight, they want rewards to include a free flight if the user wants it, or maybe even free cash or bitcoin.
There’s a couple airlines already down with this new concept and working with FlyCoin. Ravn Alaska and Northern Pacific Airways.
The way the program would work is once the reward miles earned by travel are tokenized, the traveler/investor would be allowed to earn cryptocurrency just like you could accumulate reward miles. Oh, and once the miles are tokenized, they will never expire.
Here’s how the CEO of FlyCoin explained the current frequent flyer model to Business Insider.
“When you look at what it is right now, it’s essentially like money, but not really because it’s tied to making sure that you stay within the system of the airline.”
Now we just need a company that will do something about the constant announcements on flights that beg customers to join the airlines credit card program.
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