Originally Posted by
ADLFO
While DL management may have anticipated some disappointment with DM, I'm guessing they miscalculated the magnatude of the dissatifaction as well as the unintended consequence of having many PMs/future DMs be fully educated on competing FFer programs.
FF programs, and airline ticketing in general, are very complex. Historically very few pax attained more than a cursory understanding, and the complexity served the airlines well. Thanks to consumer communication advances such as FT, we are now able to combine lots of pax brains and experiences together and quickly parse these systems. In some cases, we can understand the systems and all their permutations more than did those who designed the systems. Examples are the quick uncovering here of the weaknesses in the new DL system (such as not rolling over segments, or the flaws in the PMU). To some degree they certainly anticipated our capabilities, but probably not the magnitude of it.
The game has changed in the past few years, largely due to social media.
Originally Posted by
bwhite
I am not convinced the couple dozen unhappy FT members posting in these treads are representative of DL's elite plus population.
No, but this does represent the leading edge, and the information does disperse quickly.
Originally Posted by
bwhite
I have customers that evaluate the solutions available, then release an RFP asking for a product that combines the top proprietary features from 3 manufactures. It may be what would best suit their unique requirement, unfortunately no one can provide it and at the end of the day they still have to pick one of the existing solutions based on what best fits their requirements.
That does happen here; some people will never be happy, but I think a lot of us would agree with your next statement:
Originally Posted by
bwhite
DM adds a few things without removing any benefits that I had before, YMMV. Would it be even better with more? Sure it would! More is usually better.
I feel they came close, but no cigar. Just 10% more, perhaps only 5% more, would have been a best in class program. So near and yet so far away. That 5% difference is very visible to us on FT, and by extension will be visible both to lots of other high mileage pax and to lots of other high value pax (those two are not always the same, despite the self image of some of us).