Originally Posted by
GUWonder
...For most customers of DL-NW, these changes are the product of DL management's customer-unfriendly approach to most customers, an approach whereby DL management strips down benefits from more customers and then gives back some of them to a smaller number of customers than before....
Originally Posted by
GUWonder
...Yes, but it is also a matter of what is best for most customers and not just "me, myself and I" as Delta Airlines has a history of shifting up customer-unfriendly changes so that those which impact the non-/lower-level elites also eventually hit the upper-level elites....
The continual reference to what is best for "most customers" seems to lack grounding in the basic business tenets that in many industries, "most customers" are mostly "fill" which to some extent helps provide more diverse service to the more profitable segment of customers.
As a long veteran of business travel, I have watched as these programs have become less and less generous and have moved from one company's top tier to another a number of times and will do so again if the benefits become insufficient for me to remain a customer of any one of them.
All of those with such grievous complaints well have the same option. And if it should come to a pass that none of them provide any significant benefits, all of us will be back to the procedure followed in the '70s and early '80s of taking whoever was going at the most convenient time with some consideration of fare differentials.
And, of course, the main disappointment with this system is still the relative inflexibility of the PMUs. I do believe that some lower fare classes should permit their use, possibly by requiring the use of multiples.