Care to show us where that's documented?

If you're not a legal resident of Japan, you're not eligible to apply for it, regardless of what your DL profile states. Foreigners have a notoriously difficult time acquiring Japanese credit cards, but it's not impossible. I've had between 2 and 4 myself.

I just tried applying. Here goes nothing. If I don't get the card, I leave Delta. If I do, it's business as usual.

I know SkyTeam is pretty weak in Japan but $300 annually for GM is nuts.

My main objections to the new plan are:

1.) Devaluation of the M fare from 150% to 100%
2.) Devaluation of MQMs on many Skyteam partners
3.) No mention of the DL Reserve card that I have seen so far
4.) Not counting the full ticket price towards MQDs (after all, we pay the fare and only then do we ever get to see the fare breakdown)

Why not simply ignore MQMs altogether? Mileage does not correlate with value of the passenger to the airline, and that was what was wrong with the system as far as the carrier was concerned. As for credit card bonuses, the bonuses for credit card spend can be converted to MQDs instead of MQMs!

To me, this is huge. M-Fares are the one way to really bump up MQDs. So spend $3K each on a couple of M-Fares to use miles or SWUs to upgrade, and now you could end up not meeting the miles but easily exceeding the MQD.

Kind of kills Skyteam in favor of code shares.

One more thing. The lack of MQD rollover effectively kills the whole rollover program.

I never liked rollover from a product dilution perspective: you either earn the miles in the year or you do not.

I have only flown 2 premium revenue tickets with CX last year (in I and A respectively) but they still sent me a gift of recognition as a BIS GO.
(>90% of my flights are in S/V/L/M)

I know exactly what you mean.

Probably would have killed MQM rollover 12-15 months into launch if they weren't afraid of toxic blowback.

It's like a team deeply discounting season tickets to fill the stands. After the squad goes 3-13, you blame it on starved payroll and email your fan base they're going to foot the bill with 3x pricing.

All original decision-makers keep their jobs.

Their apologists hit online forums and sports call-in shows telling complaining fans to shut the hell up and accept corporate's "forward-thinking" business model. Like they're NOT the ones avoiding personal responsibility.

I propose a 4-tiered hierarchy of FTers in which both number of posts read and amount of mental energy expended per post are both taken into account. Naturally there should be a 50-100% bonus on posts by certain known rabble rousers, but would draw the line at rollover from one contentious thread to the next.

Now that is funny... :)

Glad to see that we can have differences of opinion, rather than insisting that only negative comments are valid. :rolleyes:

As for the rest of your comments, the reality is that DL's job is to make money not to make you or me happy customers. To date, management has been on a torrid winning streak.

Some in business would say happy customers and profits go hand in hand. In fact, I think I have heard Richard Anderson say something to that effect as he sits at CE Woolman's desk ev'ry day.