With the latest round of changes and basically trying to do away with flying-for-miles (i.e. making RDMs totally revenue-based), the U.S. legacy carriers are really hurting their position with INFREQUENT flyers once the general public catches on and starts to figure things out. Many of my posts have been about how the airlines are blowing it with this group. The recent changes by DL, US and now AA are as much about reducing costs and making the programs much less rewarding as they are about rewarding customers who pay the most more. IT'S NOT A ZERO-SUM GAME. We're getting this because of the mergers and being down to three large airlines, plus the whole cartel-like "capacity discipline" baehavior to try to drive up fares..

It'll take the public a little while to figure it out because they're not aware of the old system changing. You've got tons of tie-ins...my natural gas company, for example, awards one DL mile per dollar spent. You can play a slow-accumulation game even without flying much. But the changes to flying-for-miles removes a key piece, and without that for many infrequent flyers it isn't worth it.

Airlines now are like the Las Vegas casino that turns its nose up at low-rollers and decides to cater to high rollers. IT'S BEEN TRIED and it doesn't work...if it did, everyone would do it. But they still have to fill the plane in the back.

If the LCCs and ULCCs were smart about it they'd re-evaluate their programs immediately and look at certain policies that should be changed (like over-aggressive expiration) with an eye toward advertising that they're now BETTER AND MORE-REWARDING FFPs for most travelers than the big guys.

This would be quite a reversal from the decades-old situation where the FFP was an effective competitive weapon FOR the legacies against LCCs. OTOH, some key people running LCCs were anti-FFP ones at the legacies earlier in their careers, so maybe that's coloring the views.

We'll get slowly building awareness via consumer reporters and others on local news telling people that thinsgs have changed, that the miles they get from flying on low fares may be much less than they're used to, and that they'll probably "pay" for that free ticket through credit cards via annual fees unless they can put up an unusually high spend.

It'll take awhile for the message to sink in, but the tie-ins will become less effective and fewer companies will do them once awareness builds.

This is a classic case of doing something for short-term gain while times are "good" that'll bite 'em over the long term or when times turn bad, such as with a recession or a black-swan event.