Too late! I'm already here And a LOT of people are taking the Alaska status match, which seems to be getting a lot more press than the much quieter AA status match offer also running now.

As we've been discussing over in the Delta forum, all airlines including Delta don't make much or any profit on selling tickets, believe it or not. The expensive fares just balance out the cheaper economy fares so the net effect is costs to fly people roughly equals the revenue. Where airlines make the bulk of their profit is on loyalty programs and other ancillary businesses. And I believe that while you are probably right that most people won't flee to another airline over this (though many will), from a purely logical perspective there's no reason anymore to direct a ton of extra spend on Delta-branded cards and many people plan to get the lowest tier status they can get via flying and redirect spend on other non-Delta cards. There used to be significant incentives to spend $30K or $60K on Delta's top tier cards, and now there isn't - they blew that up completely. So even if people don't go to another airline, they're still gonna stop spending on branded cards and that will hurt Delta a lot,

I don't foresee AA or Alaska following Delta this time. For the first time all the majors are NOT staying quiet in the face of this devaluation: they're marketing their programs as much better alternatives. I think AA and AS and even United have strong incentives not to go far in the Delta direction especially as it is not yet clear if it will be a money loser for Delta as it may well be.