They're moving to reward those who spend more on them. Their technology that they use allows them to explicitly value those travelers who contribute the most to their bottom line and reward them accordingly. Technology along with capacity discipline within delta and within the industry allows them to do this. No giving away things like they use to to people who don't contribute. They don't have to do that any more. And I think other airlines will make the same decisions. Because they can. And Should.
Originally Posted by
xolinlevh
I am more and more confused by Deltas moves lately. The MQD thing i understood as a way to restrict all us MR people who leap on the $200 mistake fares to japan and reap the MQMs. But with this....all it seems to do is what others mentioned, make the poor poorer and the rich richer. For those 'average' travelers who book way in advance, plan family vacations, arent exclusive to one airline, all this does is make it THAT much harder for them to accumulate significant miles. And at the same time given the really low value of skypesos (of course they say they are fixing that but....ill believe it when i see it), cutting the earnings of regular slut fare tickets by what looks liek 25% on average, while still charging insane 100-200k for biz awards, just makes it impossible to achieve.
While at the same time it hugely favors the business traveler who expenses the trip, or travels at the last min in full paid BE tickets. As was mentioned, a last min BE fare at $8,000 as a DM with 11x points, would give 88,000 miles.
To me this just looks like Delta is trying to shoo away normal travelers and become an airline exclusively flown by business travelers with very generous travel perks.