jjglaze77

I enjoyed your post, mooper! I would just like to point out that things are in a pretty sad state when Delta Air Lines makes more money from CCs/Hotels/etc than it does from flying. If that is the case, perhaps they should stop making seats available for "revenue ($$$)" tickets and instead only allow ticket purchases with skymiles.

indufan

If they thought it would make them more money, they would.

pbarnette

No. There is pretty much no evidence that the number of elites will increase. Given the state of the economy and the travel industry, I am willing to wager that it won't.

GUWonder

People adapt best when they aren't ignorant about DL's habits in more recent times relative to the other major US airlines. Part of that ability to adapt involves recognizing the following:

"No US airline has devalued the FF mileage value proposition as much and for as many customers as DL management has done since the start of last year."

GUWonder

It's unlikely to increase it much more than the numbers of 2007 .... of course adjusting for the DL-NW combination.

Denolloyd

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A400 Safari/528.16)

Still no news from DL?

El Boocho

I think this argument falls down when there are repeated 2X offers for extended periods of time. You end up with someone who is legitimately a gold level flyer (which is a fair amount of travel) getting DM status. Now the not-so-infrequent traveler is competing fairly frequently with the VFF.

GUWonder

DL SkyMiles management is in a pickle of its own making (courtesy of DL's "rollover" status miles benefit), so it takes some time for them to figure out what to do.

Last time -- just earlier this year -- when there was AA's double status miles promotion, DL was nowhere close to being quick to respond to the launch of AA's double status miles promotion; and even then DL only went on to have a promotion that was useful to a small minority of ticket purchasers .... principally just those buying the most expensive fares.

FLLDL

AA's press release was at 11am yesterday. I'm sure DL needs to weigh cost / benefit of matching vs not-matching, particularly as it relates to roll-over / the new DM level, retroactive bookings, gift MQMs etc etc. UA does not have all of these additional complications, and is on deaths door as it is.


Personally, I'd rather not see another double MQM promo and would like to see MQMs go back to being earned purely BIS. Fat chance of that happening...

Winkdaddy

Unfortunately for Delta, it is wise for the customer to delay all bookings with Delta if possible until they know if there will be a matching promo or not and if it will be retroactive. On the other hand it is probably only a small percentage of customers who are aware of this siutation.

DLATL777

I agree with you on that! (on both fronts). I'm begging DL to lead the way instead of follow the leader on this one.

mooper

USAirways has essentially done this in allowing customers to purchase the quantity of EQMs they needed to get to the status level of their choice. I think it would be wise for other airlines to do the same because it would simply provide transparency of what is already being done. This, perhaps, is the reason they aren't doing it openly... they might feel people are more willing to pay for EQMs through activities than directly. Just as some people view radio with ads "free" (despite the fact they are paying because they spend money with advertisers), others might view bonus EQMs from CC spending in a similar light.

Well, it's not so much that it's sad, but that margins on tickets sold are *much* lower than margins on RDMs and MQMs sold. For example, it might be that a $400 BIS ticket yields $80 (20%) in profits while $400 in EQMs/MQMs sold to Amex yields $300 (75%) in profits (the cost being the marginal cost of extra benefits provided to the EQM/MQM holders).

RobertS975

Wow, many years ago, I started a thread which simply asked why was it necessary to actually fly the routes on a mileage run... why couldn't one simply declare the ticket value null and earn the MQMs... allowing DL to pocket the money paid for the ticket and still fill the empty seat, if there was a demand for it. Essentially, this would allow one to buy the status level they desired and not have to actually fly the BIS miles. This concept was so contrary to what everyone had grown to believe that it was rather angrily considered to be absurd by many who responded.

So where are we today? Double MQM promotions, another possible 30K MQMs from your Reserve card.... so once again, why does one actually have to fly the MR?

FlyingDL

super discount using SkyMiles. Instead of the usuall 40000 for round trip why not 20000 with out the rip off restrictions. That is a different twist to a old ball game of matching the competitor.

spsguy

Recently, I was speaking with a number of co-workers; all of us fly weekly for business. Among my co-workers are a mix of CO (Plat), DL (Plat) and United (1K) flyers. I was amazed that most of them paid little attention to any of their airlines promotions. Certainly, they all strived to maintain their top teir status for the in-air perks and dedicated customer support. However, beyond that, there was little thought or concern for any other elements of their status, including redemption of miles, what other airlines offered, or how irrops were handled. Using this unscientific group, it leads me to believe that it is a very small population of VFF that actually respond to these promotions beyond 10 or 20K worth of miles. I like the promotions only because I accumulate more MQMs on my business travel; but, there is no way I would pay for extra, unnecessary flights just to earn more MQMs. In fact, given the economy over the past year, I find it difficult to believe that there are people who believe it is money well spent to respond to these promotions. But, I am amazed at human behavior (mostly my own) everyday.