Yeah, Delta has gone from my preferred to carrier to least-preferred almost overnight with their new policies.
Living in Taiwan, which I currently do, I don't go home often. When I do, however, I like to stick with what I know and what is reliable. A lot of people I know go for the cheapest ticker bar none, but I stayed loyal to Delta for a long time, flying their routes on my annual/biennial trips, despite the fact they started being more expensive about 3 years ago.
It served me well. Taiwan is about 8,000 miles from where I live in Pittsburgh, so I was banking miles. I never got enough in a year to qualify for any tiered preference, but I still raked in the miles that I could use to get reward travel later on.
Then, last year, they announced that they'd be switching from miles-based to $$-based flyer miles, effectively reducing my round trip ticket from 15,000+ flyer miles to around 2,000.
At that point, I decided to switch to a new airline - maybe Korean Air or EVA Airlines. Anyway, I still had just over 24,000 miles, which under the old system could be used for any round-trip ticket within the US as long as I bought an extra 1,000 miles.
I'm going to a wedding in SF this summer, so in January, I checked and yep - it was 25,000 miles for a round trip. I still need to work out logistics for some other family members, so I didn't purchase right then.
A few weeks ago, the reward travel charts disappeared. Last week, when I purchased my round trip from PIT>SFO, it had gone up overnight to 35,000 miles. So the $70 I had spend to bump to 26,000 miles the month before was meaningless. I ended up doing the miles + cash option, which altogether cost me over $260. My wife's ticket cost $430. Not much of a savings, by any means.
Yesterday, my father-in-law bought a round trip ticket with his miles for my sister-in-law to fly from ORD>SFO over the same dates (fewer miles round trip). They charged him 42,000 MILES!
Seriously, ... Delta!? They have screwed like 90% of their customers over the past 2 months. My return flight from the wedding will be my last with them.