Originally Posted by
bergamini
Because I think it's a hard sell to complain about an airline requiring $15K in flight spend to be in the top of 4 tiers on the airline's status. TPG rates that at $7.8K in value for this year alone and if you use your GUC's wisely, probably even more.
And because the life of a Plat (which I am now after resuming becoming a road warrior again last year after a sabbatical) is not so bad.
And lastly, because the only people it affects right now are low spend DM's and it will actually help high fare bucket PM's and so there are absolutely a good chunk of PM's out there right now who know they will complete with the DM's who move to PM based on fare bucket now and not medallion priority, thus improving their chances.
I agree that $15,000 spend isn't unreasonable, but many of us have appreciated the insurance aspect of the waiver. It was nice not to have to worry about MQDs, including gaming them by the strategic purchase of tickets on other carriers and bothering with the calculations and reading of the fine print to make this work.
The more I think about the new DL rule, the more I'm concerned that the problem is that the $250,000 waiver will allow the worst of the "gamers" to continue as DM by doing extreme MS as well as getting lots of MQMs from credit cards (or rollover in some cases) while booting some people with rather reasonable frequent travel patterns from the DM ranks. To me, this doesn't look fair and I would have *much* preferred to see DL simply eliminate the DM MQD waiver entirely rather than continue it at the quarter million level if DL didn't want to have it depend on elite tier in a reasonable way or be redefined in the form of threshold DL AmEx spend (at least on ONE personal Reserve card, perhaps not counting authorized users) giving credit toward modest numbers of MQDs.