Joe Sharkey, in the NY Times, he writes about travel industry issues, just wrote 2 articles about this very thing: FF’ers getting fed up with recent unavailability and increasingly not bothering with loyalty programs and just going for the lowest fares on whatever airline. However, he recently predicted that fares would start to go up and that, as a result, fewer leisure travellers would be around, opening up the possibilities again. This was not a near-term prediction, however.