Originally Posted by
ATOBTTR
From DL's perspective, why should they give any more status (thus benefits) than they have to or need to when they're already getting $7K in revenue WITHOUT having to give away such perks? DL is already giving your boss and other such customers what he and those other customers want or need, either because they already have the preferred schedule or route or whatever. Why give away extra, "just because"? If your boss doesn't feel he's getting value from his $7K, he could always look for another carrier. That may come at other costs, such as having to deal with connections, less operational reliability, or whatever. But from DL's perspective, they're giving enough value to your boss to get his $7K without having to give away anything more to get it.
In theory, a short-haul/low-segment/high-spend customer who is savvy enough to care and in a competitive market like NYC might realize that the current qualification schemes make it very hard for them to qualify for anything but bottom-tier on any of the airlines. For last-minute tickets, it's not that difficult to be paying 50-75 CPM, so $25k is only 50k flown miles at a stretch, maybe more like 40k flown miles. Add in personal travel/CCs and that's good enough for bottom-tier on two airlines or barely mid-tier on one.
So, realizing that, this person is instead spending $7k on DL but also spending $6k on AA and $5k on B6 and $4k on UA and $3k on WN or something like that. If DL came in and said that spending $25k on DL would give them PM with lower/no MQM/MQS requirements, that completely changes the above equation, throws CPM out the window, and puts a strong pull on $18k worth of spend not currently going to DL.
I'm not saying that this is going to actually occur in big enough numbers for DL to ever have an MQD-first qualification system; but for people like OP there is an argument for it. I would bet that at least some of the $6k OP has spent on UA/B6 would have gone to DL instead if they told him MQD alone could help him qualify faster. (OP, absolutely correct me if I'm wrong on that.)