Well if you’re the guy buying and managing wine for AA, maybe you have some extra time on your hands and some extra pallets of wine given the circumstances. So rather than be axed by management, why not propose a wacky wine club promo? This article alone could have saved a couple of people their jobs. And honestly, rightly so. $50k is not a lot in the grand scheme of things for an airline, but it just may patch a hole in the budget of ‘wine division’ of the AA catering subsidiary, or something to that effect. I’m sure it’s a modest coup for someone. I doubt it was dreamt up by the CEO and discussed at board meetings as a way to save the company or anything.

So, so much this. When it comes to how companies make money, people focus on the forest and can miss out on how each individual tree is a part of it. Will one missed tree damage the company? Probably not. But it's still a sum of all of them, and those individual trees are probably supporting a few people.

one wonders whether it's literally about the marketing placement that this article gives them. I'm not in marketing, but I somehow wouldn't be surprised if this was worth more than $50,000 in "free" marketing.

To give some context to your comment, Lufthansa is currently losing €1 million every two hours.

https://simpleflying.com/lufthansa-costs-500-000-per-hour/

Maybe a trial. See how it goes and expand if it's successful.

The same guy is running it as the one who was responsible for removing the olive from the in flight salad.

-$50,000 is probably less than an ad on CNN.com would have cost, so I guess they come out ahead.

On top of that - avgeeks will buy up ANYTHING plane related, so there's an easy market to serve there