Southwest won the poll at 1st by a big margin over 2nd place Delta.

Aeroplan was waaay back in last place.

I don't think the readers are any better than the writer.

And during the NCAA's all night Southwest has been advertising RR 2 as the best FF program there is. What hypocrites.

Well, that's not hypocrisy...that's just advertising. Every airline is going to claim that its program is the best. Even after one of the biggest devaluations in the history of these programs.

Ironically, the other major devaluation I recall was a few years back when Southwest changed from a baseline of 4 R/T's = 1 Award to 8 R/T's = 1 Award, effectively slashing the normal flight benefit by half. They positioned that as "The 4 R/T thing was really just a very, very, very, very long promotion", pointing to the fact that the program did indeed originate as an 8-to-1 award scheme. Still, no major airline bothered to launch a counterattack then either. I think the legacies are still of a mindset that WN is so different that they don't really respond to it either way. AA and UA will rapidly go tit-for-tat with each other on (almost) every minor tweak one makes to their program.

Maybe I'm giving WN a backhanded compliment here...for a few years there, its program was insanely rewarding, especially if your regular business travel was simply short and cheap. (Mine were segments amongst MCI, DAL, MDW, and STL.)