pinniped

The big U.S. legacy airlines have largely normalized around what 1 mile means. For better or worse, they've created this system and it'll be hard for one of them to really break hard from it. They've long used the notion of the 25,000-mile domestic award in their marketing, and they've mostly aligned other "big" rules and primary facets of their award charts with each other. We find bigger variances in partner award charts, but that's more of a niche case compared to the everyday awards that most users redeem.

Thus it won't be easy for them to reset the whole thing down (or up) a notch. Too much marketing capital built-in already.

Hotels, for whatever reason, never coalesced around a single standard or baseline award. There's no regularly-marketed level that people associate with hotel points (e.g. 1 room equals 10,000 points or something like that) industry-wide. Thus nobody (aside from nerds like us) really thinks about how 1 HH point relates to 1 SPG point, and the programs have greater freedom to rapidly adjust up or down with huge promos/bonuses and huge devaluations when necessary.