I think one thing with loyalty programs that makes corporations care less about employees taking advantage of them (instead of going for the cheapest flight), i

I think one thing with loyalty programs that makes corporations care less about employees taking advantage of them (instead of going for the cheapest flight), is that it encourages employees to manage their logistics efficiently. Without loyalty programs, people book things at the last minute, with minimal effort spent looking at the flights (at least that's my attitude and what I've observed in cases when I've had to travel to a location has no airlines with good loyalty programs flying there). This ends up costing the company money due to poor booking. Finding good flights and other travel arrangements is an additional job duty, and usually other job duties take precedence. But if there's a possibility of a traveler benefitting from the booking, they'll do so more promptly, be willing to spend time outside of work looking at flights, and try to find reasonably priced flights to avoid this perk being taken away from them. This is my observation from travelling within a small company, it probably does not hold for larger companies.