Before coronavirus, there was a website called The Points Guy, created by a guy called Brian Kelly. Its original purpose was to teach people how to obtain credit card miles awards in order to get flights paid for by “points”. Which therefore meant “teaching” people what new credit cards they needed for their “collection” in order to obtain said “points”.

This was a clever business idea, because credit card companies were willing to have click-through links on his website, so he made god-knows-how much money per successful transfer of “consumer” to “credit card company”. We’re not talking one cent per click Amazon kinda numbers here. We’re talking big dosh.

Over the years, The Points Guy website became more of a general travel website, with a focus on luxury flying, but even today it still revolves around “teaching” people what new credit cards to get. Here’s its current homepage:

In the old days (circa 2019), each time Google served me up an article from this website, it was almost certainly a gloating pile of maple-syrupy twaddle tapped out in a plane’s business or first class, 35,000 feet in the air, aiming to sell a kind of luxury dream to poor doofuses down on the ground.

Which meant getting them keen on credit cards.

Well. A lot’s happened since 2019.

2020 happened, for one.

Killer hornets were the icing on the cake.

Don’t lick killer hornets.

As you can see in the screenshot above, The Points Guy had to add a new menu item: CORONAVIRUS.

From one day to the next, their whole raison d’être went *POOPY POP!*

Who’s going to buy credit cards to get enough free bonus points to get upgraded on, say, a Greyhound bus or an Amtrak train? It’s all about the planes, right?

Funny you ask.

This brings us to the hilarious article I was just sent by Google’s newsfeed:

The Points Guy had to switch to writing about…..TRAINS!

This was definitely the highlight of my day.

Trains!

Lol.

You’ll see over on the right-hand side that the credit card push is still going strong, even as they are reduced to writing about…..trains!

Ok, so I don’t get sued, here are some disclaimers:

• No, this isn’t the first time The Points Guy has written about trains. It was however the first time I was sent an article from them that involved trains. Their website’s search feature is a bit shit, but there seem to be 25 articles partly or mostly about trains in their archive. Nearly all of them are from the last couple of years, one of them seems to be duplicate; 2 were in 2017, 2 in 2018, 10 in 2019, and 11 in 2020. Maybe there were articles with trains from before 2017 but the search feature doesn’t help you find them. Still, you can’t help but notice a whiff of climate change refocusing in 2019 and coronavirus-refocusing in 2020. Their article entitled, Why trains are great for travellers who want to reduce their carbon footprint is a particularly cynical move for a website “influencing” you to fly business or first class.

• The title of this piece is not strictly factual: it’s not really a blog, it’s an article from a website that makes cold hard cash off people by “influencing” them into getting credit cards. Also, the article in question was not written by founder Brian Kelly, but by Clint Henderson.

On that note, I get that The Points Guy is now not just a one-man show, and there are probably jobs at stake, so I don’t want to entirely shit on their breakfast.

*Yay, trains?

However.

Choosing to work for a company whose business model is based on “encouraging” people to sign up for a freakin’ library shelf of credit cards and “encouraging” them to be enablers in making planes fart out thousands of kgs of CO2 whilst they sip champagne high in the sky is not a neutral, consequence-free decision in my book.

So I have no qualms in saying: May their website go into a long, slow, train-filled decline.