Originally Posted by
josephstern
If you are looking at Delta in isolation, sure.
But you'd do close to as well or better (depending on status) with any other carrier.
And you'd have more valuable and usable loyalty currency as a result.
I have flown those other carriers, and when I am looking at a flight on DL on a new A220 to SEA vs the cruddy slimmed B739ER on UA or a flight in First TCON on DL vs. UA or AA it really is no contest. The delta (pun intended) between DL's skypesos and what are now MilageMinus miles and AA's parkarized mileage used to be vast, not so much now. The reality is that I can rarely find any really usable flights on any airline (and to be fair, I am always looking for 2-4 seats) to the point that I recently just used MileageMinus miles on a domestic Y flight for a family trip. At 3.2c/mi I felt it was a good value compared to the (lack) of reasonable/workable J, and I figured I might as well burn the miles before UA's new devaluation kicks in.
Is there some distance between the usability of AS miles and to a lesser extent AA miles and SkyPesos? Yes. Is it enough to counteract the really poor OT performance and Oasisized planes on AA, definately not. Is there much distance between the usability of MileageMinus Miles and SkyPesos? Not really, and certainly not enough to get me to fly UA to collect miles, putting up with a much worse airline.
Bottom line is that redemption really is not top of mind for me, no airline really has a program that will tie me in at this point. I'll collect miles, and will use them if the opportunity arises, but I am just not sweating it at this point.
Originally Posted by
ijgordon
So the program in isolation isn't bad per se, it's just (1) worse than before for many travelers, and (2) worse currently than many other programs. And there are fewer opportunities for "arbitrage" given the dynamic award pricing. That said, it does make it easier to just use the miles instead of hording them for those arbitrage opportunities (although I guess they do exist with the award sales, like the ~128k r/t to Europe in business (although last time I saw that, many flights were pricing around $2k, at least from NYC, and so that's only ~1.5-1.6c/mile, not significantly better than the typical 1.3c.
exactly the way to think about it. Miles are now worth a little more than 1c. That is it.
The real impact for me is to have given up on airline credit cards. The miles are worthless, so its not where I put my spending.