Amid all the doom & gloom about the imminent massive devaluation of Cathay Pacific's MPC going the way of SQ PPS and with it, the destruction of Asia Miles for months and months, it turned out the announced revamped MPC is nothing at all like the apocalypse that people were expecting it to be.
Cathay Pacific Marco Polo Club revamped
If anything, it will take less flying to reach top tier status as long as you fly premium fares and CX is introducing the equivalent of SWUs for CX Diamond members.
Yet many doomsayers have been telling us it's only a matter of time that AA, AS and other OW associated airlines go bust and turned into DL/UA #2. JL had their "devaluation" this year but the only devaluation is only certain times of the week during busier days, as long as you stay out of those days, your mileage cost has not gone up at all. In return, they now permit one-way awards at 50% of RT and their award charts are consistently among the lowest of the industry, 32K to fly intra-China in F/J (PEK-SHA-PEK) for example whereas Aeroplan will charge you 110K.
Even the much feared SQ PPS assimilation, not only it didn't happen, people also forgot that Kris Flyer in fact has a fairly competitive reward chart because you get 15% off everything on it as long as you fly solely on SQ. And the stopover rule is very generous, you can have as many as you want at reasonable cost. With SQ staying put, there is no way CX will hike Asia Miles requirement in the way Aeroplan has been doing. All CX customers need to do is to look around and they see JL staying put, SQ staying put, AA is still very attractive and AS is interesting too.
It turns out, Aeroplan is quite alone in trying to mimic Delta and United but apparently, the industry is not taking the cue from them and nobody seriously believe two mediocre US airlines can successfully use the revenue based model as if it is a SQ or EK. As it turned out, United CEO is already out of a job. Sure it wasn't all about its FFP but there is no denial that UA is in turmoil for the poor decisions it made in the past 2 years even though U.S. economy is doing fairly well.