Newsletter · · Ashutosh Agarwal

An Airline's Miles Are Worth More Than Its Planes - Travel, Airlines & Leisure - Week of August 29, 2026

Travel, Airlines & Leisure for the week ending August 29, 2026. Podcast synthesis on Blackstone and Canadian pension funds paying C$2.5 billion for a quarter of Aeroplan at a valuation above Air Canada's own market cap, Google buying collapsed Spirit Airlines' scrubbed operational data for just 10 million dollars, Disney selling out 2027 cruise sailings, a purpose-built floating conference ship, and 42,000 hotel rooms under construction in India.

Travel, Airlines & Leisure

Week of August 29, 2026: An Airline's Miles Are Worth More Than Its Planes

Here is a strange fact that ran through this week's travel podcasts: the most valuable thing an airline owns is often not its planes, its airport slots, or its buildings. It is the loyalty program, the miles, the points, and the customer relationship behind them. One airline just borrowed against that asset from a position of strength. A bankrupt one sold off everything except the customer relationship, and the leftovers went for pocket change. And a cruise industry that has quietly become the fastest-growing corner of travel keeps proving the same point: the brand and the relationship are the real business.

The big idea: a frequent-flyer program worth more than the airline itself

The standout story came from the Airline Weekly Lounge (Aug 20), where hosts Gordon Smith and Jay Shabat walked through fresh Air Canada earnings and a headline-grabbing deal involving its loyalty program, Aeroplan.

Here is what happened, in plain terms. Air Canada is selling a 25% stake in Aeroplan, its frequent-flyer program, to an investor group led by the private-equity giant Blackstone, alongside big Canadian pension funds (the Québec fund CDPQ, plus PSP Investments and British Columbia Investment Management). The price tag on that quarter-slice is C$2.5 billion. Do the back-of-the-envelope math the hosts did, and it implies the whole program is worth more than C$10 billion, which, remarkably, is larger than the market value of Air Canada itself.

  • Why is a rewards program worth more than the airline that runs it? As Shabat explained, that C$10 billion figure values the program without counting the airline's debt, which is why the numbers look lopsided. But the deeper point stands: loyalty programs throw off high-margin, predictable cash (banks pay the airline for the miles they hand out on co-branded credit cards), and investors love that.
  • This is not a fire sale. The hosts were careful to separate this from Air Canada's last loyalty-program sale back in 2005, which was done "out of desperation" during bankruptcy, a move they said the airline "pretty much regretted the minute after they did it." This time it is done "from a position of strength." Air Canada keeps majority control, and even wrote in a buyback option: it can repurchase the investors' stake between the fifth and eighth anniversaries at a price that hands them a 6.5% annual return. One analyst framing the hosts liked: it is like taking out a mortgage on a great asset you fully intend to keep.
  • Where the money goes: part of the C$2.5 billion is earmarked to pay off a US$1.2 billion bond coming due.
  • A caution on the hype. Shabat's warning is worth repeating for anyone who reads a splashy "loyalty program worth $X" headline: these programs are only valuable because of the flights the airline operates. "It's hard to say that one is by itself is more valuable than the other," he said. "There's a lot of codependency there."

The pattern isn't unique to Canada. The hosts noted other carriers, Virgin Australia and Aeromexico, were "kind of forced" into selling control of their programs, and "in all cases, an airline always regrets selling control of their loyalty program."

The business itself? Merely okay. Air Canada posted a 6% operating margin last quarter, down from 7% a year earlier, "not setting the world on fire by any means," as Shabat put it. There's also a leadership change: long-time CEO Michael Rousseau retires at the end of August, and Anko van der Werff (currently running Scandinavia's SAS) doesn't take over until January, leaving an interim gap. A useful seasonal note for anyone modeling the stock: unlike US airlines, Air Canada peaks in the third quarter and struggles in winter, which is why it keeps adding sun routes like Bangkok and South America.

The flip side: a dead airline sold everything but the relationship

The perfect companion to the Aeroplan story came from Behind the Stays (Aug 21), whose panel unpacked a genuinely eye-opening deal: Google bought the data of Spirit Airlines, the collapsed ultra-low-cost carrier, for just US$10 million.

To be clear, as the hosts stressed, Google did not buy planes, gates, or the brand. It bought "the operational intelligence that made Spirit run": pricing models, booking curves, flight-behavior data, in-flight purchase records, even payroll records going back to 1986. What it did not get: customer names, loyalty data, or credit-card files, all stripped out for privacy reasons.

The panel's insight is a masterclass in what travel data is actually worth:

  • The valuation ladder is brutal. Because the customer information was "completely stripped and scrubbed," the whole trove sold "for pennies on the dollar." As one host put it: "Even if they were able to share more of the customer profiles and data, it would have been worth 5, 10x more."
  • The contrast that makes the point. Compare that to Air Canada's Aeroplan data, which the panel said is valued at roughly "$1,000 per record or per guest versus 10 cents" for the scrubbed Spirit files. "It just shows how much of that value is in the travel relationship with that brand," said panelist Ben. "If all you have is scrubbed data, it's basically just fodder for AI models."
  • Why Google wanted it anyway: Google says it will use the data to train its AI as it builds out AI-powered travel search and, per rumor, an in-app booking engine. At $10 million, "a rounding error for both companies," the hosts laughed, "the marketing associate at Google could sign off on this deal."
  • The fire-sale backdrop. Spirit's assets went cheap across the board. Its LaGuardia slots sold to JetBlue for $58.5 million despite being appraised at $86.7 million; its headquarters fetched $93 million after $250 million was spent building it.

The takeaway across both podcasts is identical, just seen from opposite ends: raw data and metal are commodities. The direct customer relationship, the miles, the loyalty, the reason a traveler comes back, is where the real money hides.

Cruising: the quiet giant of travel keeps growing

Two very different podcasts landed on the same conclusion this week: the cruise business is booming, and it may be the healthiest consumer story in travel.

On Behind the Stays (Aug 21), the panel got animated about Disney's cruise push:

  • Cruising is "by far the fastest growing sector of the travel industry," one host said, precisely because "it literally has no stress," an all-inclusive "organized bubble" where everything is handled for you.
  • Demand is running so far ahead that Disney is "selling out ships for 2027 summer already," helped by the fact that families book far earlier than the average traveler.
  • The genius of the model, as the panel described it: on a ship, "the audience can go nowhere else and they can buy nothing else," so the operator captures all the spending. Disney has long known how to keep kids happy, so it focuses its cruise effort on keeping parents happy, with good wine, great food, and live music.
  • The strategic logic is loyalty, not any single vacation: "It doesn't matter if you choose a cruise over a park or a park over a cruise, if it gives you loyalty over the next 10 years." (There was also a fun aside, with the panel claiming Disney's The Lion King Broadway show, at roughly $11 billion grossed over 30-plus years, is the highest-grossing single piece of media content ever.)

Over on the Money Making Conversations Master Class (Aug 17), host Rashawn McDowell, a former stand-up who says he has performed on "at least 80 cruise ships," interviewed travel advisor and 24-year Army veteran Angeletha Long of Global Travel Design (a Cruise Planners franchise). Her on-the-ground read of who is booking and why:

  • Multigenerational travel is the growth engine. Long is seeing "grandparents traveling with parents, with their children, and then their grandchildren," drawn by the all-inclusive convenience: one fare covers the room, the dining, the entertainment, and transport between "anywhere from three to even seven" destinations in a single week.
  • The ships have become theme parks that float, with rock climbing, roller coasters, go-karts, and Broadway-caliber shows nightly, which broadens the customer base far beyond families to singles (some sailings host singles-only parties) and professionals.
  • A concrete demand niche: veterans and affinity groups. Long flagged real perks worth knowing, including Norwegian Cruise Line offering an extra 10% off fare for veterans, and Margaritaville at Sea giving each veteran a free three-night cruise once a year out of West Palm Beach. She also described the booming market for chartered affinity cruises (she cited a Black-culture brand, "Grown & Sexy"), where repeat demand is so strong that guests "rebook before they get off the ship."

The through-line: cruise demand is broad, sticky, booked far in advance, and increasingly multigenerational, a rare combination of visibility and loyalty in consumer travel.

A new kind of cruise: floating conference centers

If the mass-market cruise is booming, a new niche is being purpose-built alongside it. On The Insider Travel Report Podcast (Aug 16), host James Schillinglaw toured the brand-new MS Connect in Rotterdam with Hans Rohde, chief development officer of a new brand called Transcend.

The pitch is a river cruise reimagined as a floating five-star hotel built for groups: corporate retreats, incentives, conferences (the industry calls this the "MICE" market, for meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions), plus weddings and affinity groups.

  • The product: 60 cabins for up to 120 people, fully chartered for three or four days, with the itinerary, menus, and shore excursions custom-designed each time, "not a cookie-cutter program." The ship has a large wellness center, breakout rooms, and an amphitheater-style space called "The Forum" for presentations and product launches. Rohde says they'll even put cars on the top deck for auto-manufacturer product reveals.
  • The ambition: the MS Connect is the first of 12 planned ships, with the next two (Evolve and Create) already in the pipeline; Evolve arrives in April. Hulls are built in Romania and outfitted in the Netherlands.
  • Who it's competing with: not other cruise lines. "I think our bigger competition is the resorts and hotels," Rohde said, pitching an all-inclusive, no-nickel-and-diming alternative to booking a conference at a land resort. An early charter is going to expedition-cruise operator Lindblad.
  • Why it matters: it's a bet that corporate and group travel budgets are healthy enough to fund a bespoke, sustainability-credentialed (the ship carries a "green award" and runs hybrid battery propulsion) floating-venue category that didn't exist before.

India: the next great hotel construction boom

For the lodging investors, the most substantive numbers came from No Vacancy Live! (Aug 17), where Glenn Haussman hosted Bruce Ford of Lodging Econometrics, a firm that tracks hotel development pipelines, for a deep dive on India.

The scale is striking:

  • About 42,000 hotel rooms are under construction in India today, with more than 135,000 rooms in the broader pipeline (projects 12 to 24 months from breaking ground).
  • India is now one of the top full-service development markets in the world, where "full service" means luxury and upper-upscale, the expensive end. Ford's specific examples: someone is building eight JW Marriotts and four Ritz-Carltons; there are 17 Hyatts under construction; and India's own Taj group has 17 luxury hotels under construction, likely its biggest expansion in company history. Accor is also "redoing their development deals."
  • This cycle is different from the last one. India had a pipeline in a previous cycle that "fizzled out." Ford's read on why this time sticks: "the investment dollars coming from outside of the country are more significant this time, and it's being matched by investment inside the country."
  • The geographic story is the interesting part. Only about 12,000 of the 42,000 rooms are in the top five markets. The rest are spread across roughly 20 different locations, many of which have never had a Western full-service brand. Mature cities like Mumbai and New Delhi are already built out and are now getting "select service" (mid-tier) hotels backfilled in; the luxury build is happening in second-tier cities getting an international flag for the very first time. These are big properties, too, with luxury projects there averaging over 250 rooms, large by global standards.
  • The forecast: Ford expects 500 to 600 hotels under construction in India by the beginning of 2028.

For context on the demand behind it, Ford noted India is "about one-third the size of the United States in landmass, but has four times the population," a market that is, as Haussman put it, "largely underdeveloped for hospitality" and "certainly underdeveloped for westernized brands."

Quick hits

  • Casinos are going regional. On No Vacancy Live! (Aug 22), designer guests described gaming "leaving Vegas and Atlantic City" to become regional destinations, with resorts turning into all-in-one social hubs, since "resorts are becoming the new mall," where people go to eat, see a concert, and hang out, not just gamble.
  • Virgin Atlantic still can't make money. Back on the Airline Weekly Lounge (Aug 20), the hosts noted Virgin Atlantic, 49% owned by Delta but privately held so it only reports annually, had "another just very poor year" in 2025, losing money at roughly a negative 2% operating margin. The airline blamed weak US demand after the spring tariff turmoil (its own annual report cited "US point-of-sale demand noticeably weaker than forecast"). The fleet and alliance problems that dogged it for decades are largely fixed (it now flies efficient 787-9s, A330neos and A350-1000s and is deeply tied into Delta and Air France-KLM), but profitability remains elusive.
  • What to watch, the Skift Global Forum. The same podcast previewed the industry's big September gathering in New York, whose speaker list is a who's-who of travel demand signals: the CEOs of Uber, Airbnb, Hilton, Accor, Booking.com and Expedia, plus airline leaders from Air Canada, Virgin Atlantic and Qatar Airways. Expect fresh reads on consumer travel demand heading into the fall.