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      "text": "CLEAR's bottleneck at the airports exist because of the TSA directives but also due in part from non-paying frequent flyers and low paying Amex members clogging up CLEAR lanes.",
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      "text": "Both the CEO and CFO made comments regarding taking price from unpaid (airlines highest tier frequent flyers) or low paying partnerships (Amex) on the Q4'24 earnings call. In the Q&A CEO said: \"We will be repricing some free tiers to paid tiers.\" This was followed up a few weeks later with United announcing they are eliminating the free CLEAR Plus membership. CLEAR's bottleneck at the airports exist because of the TSA directives but also due in part from non-paying frequent flyers and low paying Amex members clogging up CLEAR lanes.",
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      "text": "There's one thing that I think we don't, not being in the industry sometimes we take for granted, and I did not realize this until I worked. I made the transition, people want to save time at the airport. They really want to save time. I really don't care about the technology and as long as you give me a short line, I'll pay whatever it is. I mean, there's always going to be a price point in which people are going to pay to go to the shorter line. So if CLEAR can upgrade itself to some degree in which it charges an exorbitant amount of money, but at the same time has much fewer people and it can make a sustainable point, potentially you can survive. I don't know how they pull that off in a publicly traded environment, but potentially you can pull that off.",
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      "text": "Lower paying CLEAR members are making the experience worse for everyone else who's paying higher rates. So I actually believe that one of the solutions to the throughput problem, a portion of solution could be canceling the American Express relationship. It has a significant revenue impact to CLEAR, potentially it can backfill it with some of these elites from these other airlines that are eliminating that it's not going to be enough. But it needs to pivot that to satisfy that. And I think that's the reason why they're starting to use revenue retention and not passing number retention because if they drop that American Express partnership overnight in one year, that number's going to come down from the eighties to some number sixties or seventies, low seventies as a result of the, and that's speculation my part. I haven't done the math but overnight. So they need to make up for that shortfall revenue elsewhere.",
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      "text": "Look, we love Amex. We think having a credit card partner is important. It's been a valuable brand awareness and distribution for us. But our business has scaled significantly since 2019. And as we've talked about, the gap between the wholesale and the retail price has widened to a fairly significant level. And we believe it depresses our bookings and EBITDA, obviously benefits our working capital. The wholesale price is so low relative to the $199 retail. Look, we believe the renewal rates at full price would be larger than the percentage discount rate.",
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      "text": "Look, we love Amex. We think having a credit card partner is important. It's been a valuable brand awareness and distribution for us. But our business has scaled significantly since 2019. And as we've talked about, the gap between the wholesale and the retail price has widened to a fairly significant level. And we believe it depresses our bookings and EBITDA, obviously benefits our working capital. The wholesale price is so low relative to the $199 retail. Look, we believe the renewal rates at full price would be larger than the percentage discount rate. — Q4 2024 CFO Commentary On AMEX",
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      "text": "Source: Q4'24 earnings call transcript, Spruce Point research interview.",
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