What we haven’t had yet in quite some time is a high interest rate environment, (relatively speaking to the past 20 years), and a slowing economy (even worse a recession at the same time)…
Flight load goes down during that confluence of events (which is being seeing with softening in Q4 bookings), and I would think credit card spending goes down dramatically too or worse defaults across the board goes up.
The timing of the Delta moves with those 2 things on the horizon (however long their view of the horizon is), is quite simply a miss… .. As they said last week, they may roll back to stop the negative publicity & increased cancellation rate of Amex delta cards by going to far/to fast, but they may have to also roll back again in the future because demand goes down. Not just demand for flights, which a few of you have said is a no profit business anyway, but demand for the Amex delta card activations/utilizations decreases & there is an increase of credit card defaults…
They cant go into the Amex renewal contract without a strong sky miles program.. How can they double the revenue they get from Amex, which they are on the record as saying they need to & want.

Interesting times…. This is a future HBR business case study no matter how this plays out.