Biscoff Cookies and Muscle Memory

David J. Danto

Travel thoughts in my own, personal opinion

eMail: ddanto@IMCCA.org Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD on

Biscoff Cookies and Muscle Memory July 2026

I was walking through my local wholesale club last week when I passed a case of Biscoff cookies. Or biscuits. Or crackers. Whatever they technically are.

They immediately brought back fond memories of flying Continental Airlines out of Newark. I remember eating them in the Continental Presidents Club while watching 777s pull up to the gates and enjoying the treatment that came with flying about 75,000 miles a year as a Platinum member.

Back then, loyalty felt as though it meant something.

The cookies reminded me just how far we have traveled from those days – and not in a good way.

I have a business trip to Europe coming up at the beginning of November. My first instinct was to look at United Airlines. That is my home-airport airline, I have million-miler status, and decades of travel have trained me to begin every search by seeing what United can offer.

That instinct is apparently going to take some time to unlearn.

United could not offer a convenient nonstop itinerary. I would have needed to fly to a European hub such as Frankfurt and then connect on Lufthansa into Norway, or possibly fly Lufthansa for most of the trip. Even with that connection, the fare was roughly $2,000 more than a nonstop SAS flight from Newark.

My muscle memory kept telling me to find some way to make United work. After all, that is where I have lifetime status. I receive free checked bags, access to preferred seating, priority boarding and some other residual benefits from the years when airline status was supposed to reward the airline’s most loyal customers. That’s of course from the time before the Smisek era took the worst of each airline and ruined both Continental and United.

But then I stopped and looked at what I was actually buying.

My client is paying for premium economy. That ticket already includes many of the benefits that United status would supposedly provide, including checked baggage, better seating and, depending on the airport and fare, priority check-in and boarding.

So what exactly would my United loyalty be buying me?

A connection instead of a nonstop flight.

A fare approximately $2,000 higher.

And no meaningful improvement in the experience.

United no longer upgrades me domestically (unless you count being 27^th on the list for 3 seats an upgrade). It never provided the lifetime status level that many million milers reasonably believed they had been promised. After spending three or four decades earning that status, customers discovered that the airline could simply redefine the benefit before they reached it – and then United defended the change by arguing that its fine print allowed it to do whatever it wanted.

Legally, perhaps that was correct.

As a way to build customer loyalty, it was contemptuous.

Today, the tangible value I receive from United status is largely limited to free checked bags with a higher baggage allowance and access to Economy Plus seats when I book domestic travel. Those benefits are useful, but they are not enough to justify paying substantially more or accepting an inferior itinerary.

Internationally, where airlines make some of their most lucrative sales, United is offering me less than an airline that does not know me from Adam. SAS can give me a nonstop flight, a competitive premium-economy seat and the services included with that ticket. United can give me a higher price, a connection and the supposedly warm feeling that I remained loyal.

The feeling is not worth $2,000, and it’s far from warmth nowadays.

This is hardly a new revelation. I have written before that airline loyalty is dying. Many other frequent travelers have reached the same conclusion. But it did not fully hit me until this particular search: Why was I even beginning with United? Why was I still thinking of it as my preferred airline?

The answer was not value. It was habit. That's when I realized I wasn't making a purchasing decision. I was reliving a relationship that no longer exists.

Continental (before Bethune abandoned many of the very principles that made it great and Smisek finished the job) once gave Newark travelers a compelling reason to concentrate their business with one airline. It marketed itself as the local carrier with nonstop flights to almost everywhere worth going. I flew Continental nonstop from Newark to Oslo multiple times. That route, and many others, are gone.

I cannot even fly United nonstop from Newark to Calgary – another trip coming up later in the year. I either have to connect through a hub such as Denver or travel on an Air Canada codeshare.

The old argument for loyalty was that your hometown airline offered the best network, the most nonstop flights and increasingly valuable treatment as you gave it more business. Each trip helped make the next trip easier.

That compact has totally collapsed.

The airline has fewer useful nonstop routes to many of the places I need to visit. It has also substituted inferior aircraft on routes I fly regularly. For example, EWR to LAS is now completely operated by a 737 MAX 8s, meaning no mid-cabin lavatories on a five-hour flight. Elite benefits have been reduced, diluted or made irrelevant by the benefits already included in premium tickets. Upgrades have become scarce enough that they can no longer be treated as a serious reason to remain loyal. Meanwhile, competing airlines may offer a better schedule, a better product and a lower price.

The only organizations still reliably benefiting from frequent-flyer programs are the airlines and the banks buying billions of dollars’ worth of miles to sell through credit cards to…well…idiots.

Some consumers (the aforementioned idiots) continue collecting those miles as though they were depositing something of stable value into a savings account. They are not. They are collecting a private currency whose issuer controls the price, the supply, the redemption rules and the exchange rate – and can change all of them whenever it wishes.

Airlines appear to have forgotten why loyalty programs existed in the first place. The idea was to reward travelers on frequent, less-profitable trips so that the airline would capture their business on longer, more lucrative journeys.

Instead, airline executives and their accountants have stripped away the rewards and then acted surprised when customers begin shopping primarily by price, schedule and product.

They want one-way loyalty without providing anything worthy of it, then act surprised when frequent travelers stop reciprocating.

At this point, airline loyalty programs work best on travelers who have not done the math (again, idiots). They encourage people to accept connections, higher fares and worse schedules in exchange for benefits that may already be included in the ticket – or that have become almost impossible to use. It is ironic that the very programs meant to encourage frequent customers are now so bad that they only seem attractive to customers that don’t travel enough to know better.

Frequent travelers like me need to break the habit of checking our “preferred” carriers first.

We need to stop buying airline tickets based on the routes, service and recognition that used to exist. We need to compare what the airlines are offering today, not what Continental offered at Newark 25 years ago or what United’s loyalty program promised when we began chasing status.

Buy the best schedule. Buy the best seat. Buy the best combination of price and service.

And if the airline that wins your business does not know who you are, that may no longer matter. The airline that supposedly knows you has already demonstrated how little it cares.

Sometimes all it takes is a package of Biscoff cookies to remind you how much an industry has changed.

After decades of candid travel commentary – from loyalty program “magic tricks” to hotel check-in roulette – I’ve decided to turn some of that honesty into apparel. These aren’t novelty shirts; they’re the exact truths every road warrior wishes they could say out loud. Whether you’re quietly muttering “My loyalty points devalued while you read this shirt” or admitting “If delays build character then I’m the whole movie’s cast” you’ll find plenty of familiar sentiments… and more. Everything is produced by a reputable outfit, with black tees that work under a sport jacket plus hoodies and wicking travel gear for life on the road. The site also has my honest and snarky takes on technology trade shows. Take a look at Tinyurl.com/TechAndTravelWear. Even if you’re not buying they’re fun to read and commiserate – and if you do buy something, maybe I’ll break even. If you want a style you don’t see, just email me and I’ll add it.

This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions.

All image and links provided above as reference under prevailing fair use statutes.

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As always, feel free to write and comment, question or disagree. Hearing from the traveling community is always a highlight for me. Thanks!