I think what a lot of people on both sides are missing is that there are a lot of pax who DO care about ff programs but are not that knowledgable on them. It sometimes takes a while for changes like DL is doing to sink in to them, but they will evenually. DL is setting up a slow motion train wreck. It's the Rob Borden fiasco all over again.

A good example is two colleagues from the organization I work for who were in my country the past few days. We went to dinner last night and the topic of travel back to a conference in the states we will all be attending soon came up. Both of them were NW elites, both silvers now although one had been a plat for several years while he held a position in which he flew about 200K miles a year. Neither reads FT, but both had decided when they heard about the DL merger that it would likely seriously screw up the NW program. One had a personal bad experience with SM in the past. They said that this time they were not even going to bother specifying NW as their choice of airline as they always had done in the past and assumed that our travel office would do its usual when no specific airline is requested and put them on UA. Neither was aware that they could comp status to another airline or at least do a challenge. They were just going to abandon NW and go with the flow of what our travel office prefers, which is UA. They did not know the details of how DL had screwed up the NW program, only that DL would certainly be in the process of doing that. One, fortunately, had started burning his miles when he heard that both airlines had agreed on the merger and was down to a number that no longer equalled a free ticket. The other had assumed he still had a while to do that and was not happy to learn that DL had already lowered the boom.

Since our organization is active in over 70 countries and has a lot of air travel, and we have a choice of airlines if we assert it to our travel office, I think it is time for me to put another post on our intranet to let other expats know the more recent details of DL's shananigans and also their options to bail out before they get any more travel booked.

IMHO there is a large group of flyers to whom these issues do matter but they do not have a means of keeping up with them. Getting the message out through efforts like www.saveskymiles.com or www.dlsucks.com can eventually derail DL management's train. The key is to reach those pax who do not read FT.

I hope we can help JeffBob go the way of Robby Boy!