Originally Posted by
andrewk829
Just an excellent comment. I love this kind of "back of the envelope" estimation logic. I think an excellent job interviewing question is to ask candidates something like, "how many gas stations do you think there are in the U.S. Please verbalize your logic as you work through an estimate."
An interesting question to me is, "while 1% of Delta Skymiles members are diamonds, what % of PASSENGERS are diamonds? Surely it would be significantly more than 1% because Diamonds fly more."
That depends on what percentage of DL passengers are participants in the Medallion program, something for which I couldn't quickly find an answer. DL served 190 million passengers in 2023, which I assume means the total seats occupied across all flights, not a unique number of passengers. So, the number of unique passengers will be far fewer. On any given flight, just based on the upgrade queue, I'm guessing 1/2 - 2/3 are at least FO, and that perhaps includes no-status Medallion members with credit cards. Assuming an even distribution of Medallion status-holders on any given flight (a very bad assumption), I still think you will see a lower percentage of any given Medallion status tier on an average flight. Whether the non-status holders are repeat passengers, or (more likely) one-off passengers, that cohort is still taking up 1/3 - 1/2 of the seats.