I posted some years ago that if the U.S. carriers ever merged down to one, that one would feel no need to have a FF program.

Well, it's 3 major domestic legacies and they're acting more like they're colluding vs. competing.

DL's let's-not-have-a-chart bit in particular is looking like a huge stealth devaluation in many places, way out of line with what they had previously. I'm really glad I burned all but about 75K of miles earned there from 1990-2016. Given how expensive some of the free-ticket awards are (can't comment on the upgrades), it's hard to see why anyone would buy miles pro-actively.

You can say the DL approach is one way of trying to deal with the well-known problem of too many unredeemed miles out there and fundamentally too few seats. But saving miles is like saving Argentine pesos or Lao kip.

Of course, with so many blogs out there and so many computer tools, any kind of good deal gets pounced on and burned out faster these days. Am glad I beat the bloggers by about 25 years even though online booking in the early 90s was a lot more labor intensive (command lines and green screens).