Originally Posted by Firstboss

It is wrong to have an emotional attachment with a corporate product and take company's business decisions personally.

For-profit corporations (beyond the romantic phase of a small start-up) do not have values, feelings towards their customers, or social obligations.

They have competitors; compliance departments to navigate between restrictions from laws, sanctions, and tax obligations (+tax evasion); PR departments to fine-tune mission statements, "core values", and press-releases. This is all on top of the balancing act between supply and demand.

The product pricing and loyalty rewards are all transactional, and the profit margins must remain positive for the company. We shouldn't expect to feel "valued" or "deserving" by Delta or any other company.
For customer it must also make sense to stay in the program as opposed to getting more value from being a free agent.

The subject here is that Delta made a bad business decision in terms of hurting business relationship with its loyal customers, and they are looking at the ways to repair the potential damage, purely for the financial reasons, not because of some perceived feelings.

Building customer loyalty used to be a distinctive feature of American companies as opposed to European ones: more willingness to lose money in a transaction or a small dispute but ensure the customer returns again and again. Pushing repeat customers to become free agents is a very poor strategic choice