Originally Posted by ATOBTTR

Well there's lies, damned lies, and statistics. And I don't think "200 million passengers" is 200 million UNIQUE passengers but a figure that also includes repeat passengers across the year. Of course, no such publishing breaking down what percentage of this is Medallion versus Skymiles members versus no FF program at all is made though, at least that I'm aware of. That said, when DL sent out those "your year in review" videos that had individualized stats, one of the stats was "you flew X miles, putting you in the top Y% of flyers" (I don't remember if that was for % total flyers or % Medallion flyers). IIRC, in my video, where I finished as a PM for the year, it said I was in the top 3%. Again, I don't remember if that was for all flyers total or if that was just Medallions. (What I did notice too was that I think it counted BIS miles and counted the distance flown, not MQMs as the figure it displayed for miles flown didn't match my MQM total, which included AmEx bonuses and class-of-service bonuses, but the mileage total did add up about right if my mileage redemption flights that were on DL were also counted; but I could be wrong in all of this)

Medallions may make up a smaller percentage of the total number of people who flew DL, but they obviously fly more frequently, hence why even if Medallions only make up a smaller percentage of flyers on DL, Medallions can make up a significant percentage of a given flight because of their repeat frequency. In other words, in a simplistic format, person "A" is Medallion and flies multiple times, while person B and person C are non-Medallion flyers. Thus person "A" is 33% of this total group. Let's keep this simple with two seats available on a flight. Person A occupies 1 seat and Passenger B occupies the other one day. Next week, Person A flies again and occupies one seat while person C occupies the other. Person A accounted for 50% of the seat occupations while only being 33% of the "unique" passenger count. Meanwhile passenger B and C each are also 33% percent of unique passenger count, but each individually accounted for only 25% of the seat occupations. This is simplistic and obviously the figures used are not representative but the principle is.