Originally Posted by MileKing

I posted in the "Only Randy Peterson" forum that I didn't think DL deserved any awards for this as it was only a test. The time to give them an award is when they move to no capacity controls as a permanent feature of the SkyMiles program, if it ever happens. Randy believes an award would encourage DL and others to continue testing and give the idea more consideration.....FWIW, I tend to doubt it.

In thinking about DL's test further, it's not clear what they were really testing. I believe the claim was to see if they could meet current award demand without capacity controls. Of course, since the test was not advertised until after the fact, whatever results they received are of questionable usefulness. People were/are operating under the assumption that awards are capacity controlled and thus likely tend to book much further out than they would if capacity controls were lifted. In fact, if DL did lift the controls, a number of people might switch their airline of choice to DL, increasing the number of miles awarded and the number of redemption requests. Not clear how they could correct for this in the results. If the test had been advertised, it would have skewed the results as well since everyone and their brother would have tried to book awards.