Wise words in this industry.

If I'm being honest, if it wasn't for the SDC benefit, Delta could probably take Skymiles out back and shoot it and I'd barely notice.

I think the biggest complaints I have at this point are (1) they don't just make the peg between SkyPesos and ticket price explicit and insist on being "sneaky" about it while fooling nobody about the end goal and (2) I would either like the peg to be a bit over $0.01; a bonus for paid First bookings (a la Southwest giving more points for Business Select); OR I'd like to see the elite earning bonuses bumped up a bit.

Hmmmm. Only partial truth here. I don't think the entire flying public wanted a oligopoly in which much of these customer unfriendly changes can happen due to lack of competition.

I also think it's fair to say that while the "average passenger" might be blamed for choosing to fly the cheapest fare handy, you cannot really fault them for the merger process or the fact that new entrants into the field often have to go through hell to get started up (witness the saga of the VX startup) or to "break in" to various markets (for an extreme example, DAL's gate limits basically mean that nobody but WN can do anything useful there).

The real shame is that more than a few mergers weren't so much opportunistic expansion mixed with hedge fund shenanigans (as was the case with the AS/VX merger) but were functionally "rescues" of troubled airlines on one side of the equation (e.g. America West taking over US Airways and then American). I suspect that this, in turn, was a function of the history of airline bankruptcies which scared off any external "white knight" bidders. I think 6-8 "large-ish" airlines is probably about the right number (versus four now...WN is probably set to overtake AA in the next year in terms of pax count).

I agree with your post, but I'm confused by your last line. Isn't WN more like 150-160 million pax a year and American more like 190-200M? There's no way they're growing that much next year.

If you meant United then WN surpassed UA/Continental a while ago.

Obviously all of the above is on passengers and not kilometer pax or revenue. All of the airlines are about twice as large as WN on those metrics.

This is what I was glancing at when I pulled data:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/...g-us-airlines/
My guess is that there's a hair being split (domestic market share isn't the same as overall ridership, and WN's international footprint is limited to a hatful of Caribbean/Mexican/Central American destinations). The idea that AA has 30m international passengers is a bit of a stretch to me...but it isn't utterly implausible, just a stretch.

American does have about 30M international pax (compared to a paltry 3-4M for Southwest) - BTS stats.

Not sure why that is surprising - between the widebody fleet that makes up about 17% of their total fleet size (at twice the passenger count as their average narrowbody) and large "nearshore" international (Canada, Central, and Northern South America) activity using narrowbodies - 30M seems like a perfectly reasonable number.

I think half of the problem is that I conceptually treat Canada as "domestic" since the fare rules to/from the major airports there tend to be the same as regular domestic rules. Then I think of how thin the TPAC routes are and totally forget how busy TATL routes tend to be (even if they're usually split up between US and foreign carriers).

Not exactly. More choices is a good thing if it isn't used as a guise for devaluation. Introduction of 3 to 5 tier award system is the proof in the pudding. Jeff said no changes to amount of low awards when 3 tier came out. You think that was true?

This is nothing but DL's way of pushing up normal Y and F awards.

I simply don't see myself booking delta awards as often just not worth it

It seems to be limited right now to the lowest level millage fares right now. The uncharge on most routes I saw was between 1,500 and 2,000 miles. However once again as we saw with the cash fares, these new BE fares aren't lowering prices at all and are just replacing the old cheap main cabin fares and essentially creates a medallion tax. I have booked several 5,000 mile MC OW awards for family and friends on MCO-DCA several times in main cabin so I know this to be true from past experience. I'm sure as what happened with cash BE fares that over time the number of miles needed to UG from BE to MC will continue to increase and will be expanded to higher millage fare classes. #KeepDescending

There's an existing thread on this topic --

Basic Eco is now available on awards!