This seems like reward program suicide, I don't get it. Long time VS flyer, US based and held their CC on and off for a number of years.

1. The program was always a niche program but was a transfer partner with every possible partner which made points easy to obtain or top-up. It's still a niche program and can be profitable selling to bank partners if they preserve some value.

2. They added AF/KLM which created some arbitrage opportunities, with the main benefit that Flying Club became more popular. IT has been a problem in the past (Covid showed how bad that really was) but it was easy to get a knowledgeable agent to book something (my personal experience). Dynamic pricing means that they likely got the same IT as Delta to be able to handle dynamic pricing. I'm guessing this was in the works for a while now.

3. VS route expansion has been non-existent and fleet consistency a major issue (hate the old A330 and 787, love the A350 and A330-900). VS doesn't have the route map that have members flying on VS metal and that's a big program. They are struggling with profitability, and Flying Club should be an asset to help with that.

4. Using miles on VS from the US was always a coupon book approach. High fees and surcharges, but decent availability and frequencies made for "Affordable" UC seats. I appreciate that aspect of the program, but high mile awards and high surcharges means that flying club is now useless for nearly all members looking for a VS metal redemption.

5. VS US credit card gave a companion voucher that got enhanced for the better (can use for 50% off single seat). The new card is only offering 1x miles per USD spent, which was already a downgrade from the former issuer that offered 1.5x miles per USD. I did notice the 75k/150k term in the credit card terms and conditions for the companion voucher so this explains why it was there.

With this change to dynamic pricing, and the note that a) vouchers will be capped at 150k for Silver/Gold, and b) earnings on tickets will increase drastically tells us that award pricing is going much higher. In low-season they will throw some cheap seats out there to point to having that available, but any sort of peak flight is going to be ugly (but similar to Delta, it's available for 550k miles and 4,500USD fuel surcharge).