Originally Posted by
AlohaDaveKennedy
Because of the black swans. The dollar may make foreign travel look good, but things like airplanes dropping from the sky and terrorist attacks may suddenly curb demand. You can never predict when the herd will suddenly stampede or we would all be rich playing real estate and the stock market. Delta is tap dancing in a minefield by turning on its customers.
+1. They lost me, unless circumstances totally force me to take them (and probably credit to some other program). There were huge dips due to 9/11, SARS and the great recession in the aughts (just to think of three).
Now Spirit is going to add 9 more routes to the 5 or 6 it already has out of ATL, despite DL and WN having bigger operations. So leisure travelers will have WN with the free bags, NK with the charge-for-everything but much lower base fares, and DL for....what? Arguably NK and WN both have more-rewarding FF prgrams for low-rev people now, especially if u can tap into the credit-card-linked ones on NK. With DL a $200 ticket now gets 1,000-1,400 miles, so you'd need 18-25 for a 25K award that probably won't have availability anyway.