Frequent Flyer Miles Consolidator (FFMC)
Pain area among not-very-frequent flyers. They tend to take different airlines for different trips, accumulate not-so-significant frequent flyer miles in each of them. Miles accumulated in any single airline is surely not enough to buy another ticket. While it is enough to buy goods from the airline's shopping website (e.g. Lufthansa), other factors (e.g. extremely high shipping costs) block that option for redeeming the miles. As a result, much of their miles lapses.
Proposed solution. FFMC will consolidate miles from different airlines into a single account. At the minimum, it should provide alerts close to expiry of airline-wise individual block of miles. It would be better if FFMC can aggregate these individual blocks of miles into a sizable amount of miles on any of these involved airlines, or in some other FFMC-partner airlines, or into 'smiles' which is FFMC's own miles-equivalent currency. In addition, FFMC can help customers redeem miles or smiles within itself or via partnership with leading e-tailers.
Benefits:
1. Flyers realize value for their frequent flyer miles instead of letting them lapse.
2.
Competition:
As of Mar. 2009, could not find a single such company.
Questions:
1. Is this legally possible?