Some seem to be losing sight of this basic marketing question: What is the point of having a frequent travel program at all?

From the airline's point of view, the purpose is to make more money than it would without such a program. It should not be a charity meant to reward customers, if those customers aren't motivated to spend more money than they would have anyway. At that level, it doesn't matter how you define "good" customers.

Delta spent years running a SkyMiles program which most rewarded the frequent flyers who showed willingness to spend discretionary money, both in terms of miles flown and fares paid.

They have now changed everything, ostensibly to reward a portion of their customer base who as far as I can tell will not be motivated to spend an extra cent with them. I have yet to see one self-described high fare flyer say that they will spend more money on DL because of the changes. Some are happy with the new status they will earn, or the extra miles (sure, why not?) but that doesn't help DL's bottom line. More have said that even they aren't happy with the changes, and have less incentive to fly DL now than before.

LUT fare PMs now have the (theoretical) ability to upgrade about 20% of their flights, vs a previous 0%. Delta may define this as a "significant improvement", but most of them reporting here are mad as hlll, aren't they? And of course they won't re-earn their status based on LUT fares, but perhaps looked at realistically, they don't lose too much as LUT GMs. They certainly have no incentive to fly more, but in any event, they're the customers DL apparently cares least about.

Meanwhile, Delta is removing most of the incentive to those of us previously motivated to "spend up" by removing most of the rewards for doing so.

I keep asking myself, Why would they do that? Keeping F seats free for last minute high-ticket flyers is simple: assign fewer seats at time of booking, waitlist more, and upgrade more at the gate (I believe DL was already doing this, in our market anyway). There was no need to chase off a bunch of medallions to accomplish that.

The only halfway sane answer I can see is that Delta made the assumption that a significant portion of the K+ flyers would be motivated to "buy up" to M+ fares AND on top of that, spend the money for many extra MUgs. And there's the crux: I think they're wrong. It's not gonna happen. I don't think DL has a clue as to what makes its medallions tick - any of them, but especially this group, which I was part of. Stealth (well, call them incremental) K fare increases, as some have suggested, might have strung many K+ flyers along for awhile, but the way they've handled it merely emphasizes that Delta has basically said:

pay a lot more to get an F seat (even though it's not a better product than the competition), or

pay what you've previously paid for that F seat and end up 75% of the time in a coach product that is worse than the competition, but keep your current status, or

pay less than you have been and end up in coach at least 80% of the time AND take a cut in status (when you can pay the same on the competition for a better coach product or more chance to upgrade AND make your current status).

Yes, there are emotional responses on this forum, but what most people seem actually to be doing is based on pretty cold calculations of where they'll be best off. Personally, if anything, I am grateful to Delta for opening my eyes. We will save a lot of money and time this coming year by flying on another airline. I don't think Delta could get us back at this point even if they were to rescind all the changes they've just made, and that is straightforward practicality, nothing else.



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