Originally Posted by mike_plat

I think we all appreciate you posting here, but unfortunately I think you have missed my point. For example, the Zone 1 boarding looks immediately bad to scores of people on FT. That's because we spend a lot of time in airports. On a SFO-ATL flight, for example, there are literally dozens of people on the UG list. Now all of them are going to be cramming into your FC boarding. Is that the premium experience you're after? It should have looked bad to enough to anyone at DL that it shouldn't have made it out of the prototype shop. If you had floated a poll about the proposed Zone 1 boarding on FT before you productized it, you would have had your answer within 2 hours, it would have been free of charge, and you would have gotten a very accurate answer of how it will be received. Instead you'll need to do an autopsy to figure out what was the cause of death, all the while having egg on your faces.

I think this example speaks to all the criticism levied on DL management about being out of touch with your customers. Does anyone at DL try to use your own product in the same way your customers do? It's certainly not obvious to me. Just try it. No special perks. No corporate travel department to snag you that F seat. Try booking your own flight on that public website, try playing the "don't board or lose your place in the UG queue" game, and try controlling your impluse to switch to another carrier when you see 15 open BE seats on a flight 3 days from now and the award seat still costs 370K miles (as is the case now with LAX-SYD).

The fact that you posted it here first is, I assume, trying to capture a lot of the goodwill that COInsider does when making similar announcements. The main difference between DL and CO in this regard is that COInsider already knows how it will be received (for good or for bad) because, IMHO, CO is in better touch with the sentiments of its customers. I challenge DL to rise to the same level.

At the risk of turning this diatribe into a harangue, if you were to fix 2 problems with SM that so many on FT have complained about the most vehemently, then most of us would agree that you (finally) have the best-in-class loyalty program that was first promised 2 years ago this month: SWUs usable on international Q fares instead of M, and bring down those stratospheric redemption rates to the levels of your competitors. If these items had been done a month ago, I would not have bought the first 2 tickets on *A that I have bought in 3 years. I'll send you the receipts if you'd like to feed that information back into the corporate post mortem machine.