Originally Posted by
CJKatl
OP, suppose you sold apples and oranges. Historically, you made $0.01/apple, but $1.00/orange. It's barely worth selling apples, but you continue doing so in order to get people in the door to buy oranges. People that buy oranges are people you really want to get in the door, so that's who your primary marketing aims to bring in the door.
Years go by. You continue to market oranges. One day you realize the apples are actually now the moneymakers. You do the math and find that you are now making $1.00/apple and only $0.01/orange. Would you continue your marketing program aimed at people that buy oranges? No. Would you change to marketing to people that buy apples? Yes. Would you be expected to keep marketing primarily to orange buyers because that's what you've always done? Of course not. ... The market has changed. ...
the thing is, it didn't change overnight ... there has been a lot of chatter across the FF community for a lot of years that those business models were unsustainable ... clearly the airlines knew that too; unsurprisingly it has taken pretty much all of them a long time to decide on and deploy new ones, and equally unsurprisingly (judging from a lot of the aggrieved reactions of shock and horror) much if not most of the FF community appears to be taking the news really personally
while there's a great deal of intellectual horsepower evident in a great number of posters and posts across FT, I still find a lot of today's whining somewhere between amusing and pathetic: FF programs have been evolving pretty much since they came into existence the early 1980s; those of us who have been members since then will certainly recall the days of 750- and 1000-mile segment minimums, 1000 miles for car rentals with participating partners, 1000 miles for hotel stays with participating partners, etc ... as well as much more generous redemptions such as 5000-mile one-way upgrades (and my personal nostalgic favorite, from TWA -- 50000 miles for a domestic round-trip F ticket PLUS an upgrade from any coach fare for a companion)
stuff happens ... we all have different value propositions with respect to our travel patterns and preferences; what "works" for someone flying a handful or two sub-500-mile segments a week likely isn't what "works" for someone flying a weekly TCON roundtrip, neither of those paradigms likely "works" for someone who spends 16-24 hrs a month on TATL/TPAC flights, and the various combinations of to-ing and fro-ing make it absolutely impossible for Delta or anyone to offer a single program structure that pleases ALL their customers