Originally Posted by Zorak

I know a lot of people have a dim view of DL's competence, but do people believe

- DL is too stupid to segment their survey results by F/J
- DL is unaware of what its own J bookings look like both recently and in the near future



We weren't in the middle of a prolonged global pandemic situation years ago. Context matters. Which is why all the snickering "beer cans can't carry COVID but soda can" or "I guess you can't catch COVID on international flights" are misplaced, IMO. Sure, if you focus extremely narrowly on that specific thing, I agree it seems ludicrous for anyone to think that handing out a can of beer is inherently any more or less risky than handing out a can of soda, and obviously the risk in eating a meal on a plane doesn't change based on the plane's destination.

But those decisions aren't being made in a vacuum. Of *course* some of it is cost cutting, but some of it is safety related, some of it is practical/logistics, some of it is keeping FAs happy, and some of it is keeping customers happy (and different customers prioritize different things). Presumably they are balancing all these factors, and while we will surely continue to argue about the relative proportions of those factors, it seems understandable to me that different routes/markets could have different pressures and so maybe they make different compromises domestically vs. internationally. Marketing isn't going to come out and say it in those terms of course...

So while it's great that everyone's announcing they're moving all their business to AA (do we get points or something for announcing this publicly?) unless you think DL is happy flying F cabins full of upgraders and nonrevs, presumably they have macro data vs. anecdotal complaints on FT and they believe they can sustain what they're doing or weather the storm for at least a while longer. It's entirely possible they're wrong about that, but I imagine they'll re-evaluate as the situation continues to evolve.

Plus, the active discussion in the status match thread, plus discussions in other airline forums on FT shows that interest in switching airlines goes in both directions.