Yep, I am aware, and as someone who's sitting on close to a million miles right now, I certainly sympathize with frustration over the continual devaluation of miles.

I do think, though, that international award tickets – especially J tickets – were under-priced until recently, especially relative to domestic award tickets. The recent trend of moderately cheaper domestic award tickets and significantly more expensive international award tickets seems reasonable to me, though admittedly depressing for people, like myself, who are sitting on a bevy of miles.

If a million people experienced a natural disaster and there was a high demand for medical assistance, I would love to drop my day job and help, but ultimately I do not have the expertise, knowledge, nor tools.

Not to defend Delta, but I just wanted to point out I think your argument is invalid, as Delta's IT organization probably is not well-equipped to assist customers with rebooking requests.

They probably have the tools (since I'm assuming some helped to develop them), but lack the training, resources, supervision, and management...

In the other direction, Delta's customer care folks also probably do not know how to push changes out to their customer-facing website.

Except that several people reported that RM employees were manning phones during IT Meltdown 2016. Last time I checked, those employees don't regularly take calls either.

While I'm not the poster you quoted, now that their "it's complicated" relationship with AS is ending, which was one of my biggest reasons for buying DL F, we'll see. I usually only fly DL to visit family that is near Atlanta and in Florida, and this year I decided to book AA direct to MIA and rent a car for the couple hour drive, vs pay DL $600 for Y, because somebody in AA revenue management didn't turn off the saver flights the Wednesday before Christmas :p and decided to turn them on literally the day after Christmas. This is one of the best deals I've been able to find for 15k lonely Avios.

Fly United to IAH and connect from there! :D :p

Better keep RM off the phone. They probably always said NO! to every customer request for alternate routing rebooking or tried to charge them 17 times the original ticket price more.

Due to AA's lack of saver award availability, I started flying DL quite a bit more, but with this recent DL devaluation, I'm done with these legacy carriers. I travel for business and buy rack rate last minute fares, so I'm a high margin customer. For me, award miles are the most important part of the frequent flyer program and I really don't care if I'm upgraded to the front of the plane while on a work trip. I'm done with Delta and done with American. Southwest Airlines all the way, baby. DING! I'm now free to move about the country.

Unless you are a victim of slavery, nobody is forcing you to live in ATL or fly Delta.

And that's about it! Plus a few stereotypical vacation locations in the Caribbean.

ruckzac, when the tickets were priced at 80k or 90k, a Biz ticket on a route that I frequent often cost in excess of $5,000, today it normally costs less than $2500, and the miles asked are between 140 and 170k. Furthermore I must add that capacity across all Transatlantic carriers has increased and load factor lessened. There is no reason to be doing this at this point, other than to mess with their best customers.

What is more insidious, and many of you do not get, as you are generally not originating in Europe is that it is often these inflated rates PLUS ridiculous YQ's, so you are talking 170k PLUS $400-500 per ticket, and when talking about Econ fares vs redemptions youa re seeing differences of only $100-200.

How much has capacity increased and load factors decreased?

Typo. Meant Skyteam, not Skymiles. I had always thought that the Skyteam JV required that partner award inventory was only available in low, that is the low level the member charges. So if DL is 70, how can a partner be higher than that?

Good question Beckles, AFAIK it has only increased a small amount among the traditional US and European trunk carriers, however there has been an uptick from the ME3+Turkish, not just from their hubs into North America, but with these 5th freedom routes they have been starting. but what it has meant that all that connecting traffic from the Asian Sub-continent and Middle East that once existed is gone, not to mention from even some Eastern European destinations now go through these places rather than Europe. Look at it this way: A decade or so ago TK had one flight a day to JFK, today depending on season and political mood, They fly to 11 North American destinations with up to 15 flights a day, when you consider that they also have flights to South America, whereby once upon a time people would connect through Europe or the US for such flights, and that all the ME3 also offer these flights, you see the issue.

When one ALSO factors in all the Norwegian, Wizz, WoW, Level, etc that is being thrown into the marketplace, it is a lot of capacity, not on one particular route or hub in particular, but it adds up..........which is why most of the last year, except absolute peak times, one could get sub $500 RT fares from Europe to the US, and very often sub $2200 Biz fares from numerous destinations on all major carriers, often with little or no advance purchase restrictions.

It is against this backdrop that Delta is (stupidly in my opinion) deciding to kill their SM members through these changes.

While this has traditionally been how they priced partner awards, I have seen nothing to indicate it was actually contractual. Further, this is not exactly new, DL has had two award levels on VS flights for a number of months now. We've also seen opposite examples where partner metal flights have priced below the "lowest" level to be found on DL metal (in particular flights to AU).

Hyperloop? :D

I assume the OP meant non-stop?