I do as well... and it will be beyond all recognition as an award program if/when it gets implemented.

The sad reality, as pinniped inferred, is that airlines have become too dependent on the easy money from pumping out credit card miles. While it seemed to be a low-hanging fruit, it has now turned out to be the forbidden fruit that's going to get frequent flyers kicked out of Eden.

The author's facts are wrong, so why not their conclusions?

One key claim of the author is:
Not at all. With Southwest, you still earn a flat 600 points for just about every partner activity, except credit card and dining. Doesn't matter if your hotel room is a cheap Super 8 or an expensive Hilton, you get the same 600 points (before any bonuses). Doesn't matter if you rent a subcompact or a luxury car from Avis or Hertz, you get the same 600 points. Now, maybe that will change at some point, but so far the biggest airline with a so-called "revenue-based" program isn't 100% revenue based. (Also, earning on Southwest flights isn't as simple as based on revenue, it's even more dependent on the type of fare you buy, which may or may not mean more revenue!)

Having said all that: All the above airlines which have gone to a mostly-revenue program are airlines which don't belong to alliances or have much in the way of airline earn or redeem partners.. However, an airline that belongs to an alliance has to maintain some system of earning and redeeming across the various airlines in that alliance.

The one thing you can't do across an alliance is earn status (by the rules of another airline in the alliance). So it's much easier to make status-earning acrrual-based (as Delta just did to some degree) than to make earning, or especially burning, of an airline in an alliance (or with tons of worldwide partners, even if not in an alliance, as in the case of Alaska), be totally revenue based.

And, as has been mentioned before, factoring in revenue into status earning, as well as into some bonuses, is not new at all. (We've all seen bonuses that upon reading the fine print only turn out to work with fairly expensive fare buckets.)

Why would an airline want to keep a mileage runner out?

For one, I totally agree with you - they are statistically insignificant to the overall pool of elites. And second, a happy mileage runner could become an evangelist for your brand in a way that your typical business traveler never could. Somebody who loves United and/or MileagePlus enough to fly around in their planes for no other reason than to collect miles and status might also be someone who would tell others about the experience.

The fact that they collected more miles per dollar than the typical business traveler is a tiny cost to pay. After all, by the very method with which mileage runners seach for fare deals, they'll likely to end up on off-peak flights anyway. The airline isn't *losing* money on them. They're simply beneficial in a different way than the normal business traveler.

(For the record, I am not personally a mileage runner.)

The same airline that recently changed their policy to keep mileage runners out is the same one which has far worse redemption (in part due to the 3 redemption tiers rather than just 2) than the others.

So do you really need to ask "why"? That airline already likes to p*ss off those who care about FFP value. Isn't this new action consitent with their previous action (both p*ssing off those who care about FFP value)?

I think a mileage run doesn't hurt the airline much. What does hurt is the significant portion of mileage runners who are also chronic complainers (to get compensation or otherwise) and who pounce on mistake fares for themselves and 10 family members at a time. That type of customer can't be good for an airline.

I doubt the airlines have a problem with people who do one or two mileage runs a year to supplement normal travel patterns.

Chronic complainers get cut off eventually: they have systems in place to control for that.

It's also their systems that issue the alleged "mistake" fares. Strong emphasis on alleged... If I book a fare that they issue, why is that my problem? If they make 11 seats available in a given fare bucket and I book them all, why is that a problem?

If that kind of customer isn't good for an airline, stop issuing those fares. The airlines themselves completely own and control their systems and their QA processes.

For what it's worth, I can understand how any airline's first mistake fare was an actual mistake. Subsequent "mistakes" are a conscious cost-benefit decision to undertest the applications or fail to alter known system features. That's okay, as long as they then behave honorably in the marketplace when they issue these fares.

If delta does move to a southwest style revenue based FF program the vast majority of Delta Amex customers will move to other products...short term most will be ignorant, long term the revenue they now enjoy from AMEX will dry up.

Would Delta even be profitable without selling miles to AMEX? I have serious doubts they could remain profitable long term. I'd love to know the spend & carry rate for the Chase SouthWest visa compared to their other products (BA & UA namely)

The premise that mileage runners hurt airlines is completely illogical. MRs are a boon for airlines. Now I'm not talking folks who keep capitalizing on mistake fares and errors, I'm talking about the vast majority of the small minority that comprise the FT mileage running universe.

Every single ticket a mileage runner purchases is 1 less ticket the airline needs to sell, and sell at that price. You think they're butthurt about higher demand? What kind of silly argument is that? An airline will take 2cpm from a novice traveler as happily as it will from a seasoned mileage runner who thinks he's 'gaming the system'. When the airline has exhausted its supply of lower priced tickets (thanks, mileage runners!), guess what the next step is? They may think of raising the price.

Supply meets Demand. The market clears. We're not gaming them by mileage running, boys. Not even close.

This is the last thing an airline executive will think of when proposing a revenue based program, and those who think otherwise have an overly self-inflated opinion about what their activity means to the airlines.

The airlines are quite good at supply and demand; they have far more man hours in research and fine tuning this than any of us have (unless one happens to be doing that sort of thing).

The reality is that there are price points that the airlines will sell their seats at, and once that particular inventory is gone, they move up in price... supply and demand.

What the airlines also want though, is to maximize the profit, so they are hoping they can get a premium out of each person, and to offset any "perks" that have to be afforded to the person sitting in the cheap seat. For example, an elite that buys the cheapest fare, then gets to choose and Economy +/Economy Comfort/MCE seat, which means one less seat that could have been supplemental revenue, or if upgraded to first, via miles or other means, one less F seat to try and upsell, not to mention whatever cost that may entail for supporting an elite sitting in this cheap seat (calling in for an upgrade, free standby due to status, etc.).

So one way to capture some of those "true" elite dollars is to bring in a revenue based elite track. They want some tangible dollars for the perks bestowed upon us.

The other way is to get revenue from non-elites that will be interested in paying cash for an upgrade, or extra cash for extra inches, or priority boarding, or changing same day flights, all for a price.

I think historically, airlines originally thought of status as a reward for the frequent flyer, assuming that the more you flew, the more you spent. As a result, those perks should come with that frequent flying. As the industry got squeezed in the past couple of decades from all sides (operating cost, lower fares, etc.), they have taken a hard look at these perks and realized there is an actual cost associated with them and there is now a desire to get some of that back in form of revenue, one way or another, via a la carte services/perks, or a revenue floor that qualifies one to be an "elite" or frequent flyer. I am sure this has been aided by MBA number-crunchers and the development of systems that allow for data-mining.

It's ridiculous to believe that MR's have any impact on airlines AT ALL! For every 10 mileage runners you know on FT, there are 10,000 people in this country who would look at you like you are NUTS.

The more that Jeffy Jeff and Jeff worry about this stuff, the more they lose sight of what really matters.

Why, also would they want to run off us mixed fare flyers? If they screw me on my leisure trips, then why should I go out of my way (and often I have to with our corporate travel office) to fly them for biz? Answer - I won't!

I have never done a MR and never flown an LCC on domestic or TATL. I have flown LCC's a lot intra-Europe because most of the European carriers monkeyed around with their ff programs to screw leisure flyers. Now BA has swung back and treats all flyers fairly on earning miles (though not on YQ), so I have been doing more flying on them.

It's not the paid flying at low yields that hurts the carriers. It's giving them top-tier status that does. Now you have a guy flying around in upgraded first that's displacing higher-yield travelers with lower status.

You make it sound like there are mileage runners who go from 0->100K. That's just ridiculous. Maybe somebody does a MR or two get from 90K->100K, but that's hardly saying that that customer brought no revenue to the airline. And then we can debate what you call a mileage run -- if I'm at 94K in December, and decide to spend a long weekend in Hawaii at the end of the year, is that a mileage run?

I stand by my statement -- the number of folks doing pure MR's are so small it's not even worth thinking about, let alone trying to do something about.

It amazes me how many people seem to live in a black and white world.

I agree. A lot of people end up within a couple thousand miles (or less) to an elite level by December.

I think DL is counting on AA and UA to match. But you can lay this one directly at the feet of consolidation and lack of competition. With 3 major legacies you've got hub captives being divided up and much less competition. It's easy to see the old NW being a holdout on this if DL had tried it with 5 or 6 carriers, but we know what happened there.

I think the unintended consequences could be serious. Companies and travel managers already hate FF programs and see them as a form of kickback incentivizing bad behavior (like waiting until the last minute to request your trip). This draws an even straighter line there and throws down the gauntlet.

If you're in back on a leisure trip and not getting the mileage bonus (or only getting 25%), and are regularly #70 on the upgrade list or not there at all, other stuff like bag fees start to annoy if you can fly WN without them. Or what about Spirit, which is awful with the nickel and diming but might be $60 RT on a sale where DL would be $200.

For that segment it could accelerate the trend toward price being everything and LCCs and ULCCs getting most of the new market share. In my own case, rather than flying to cities like SEA so I can take DL to Asia, maybe I take the cheapest option and bank miles in that program.

You'll also have more people giving up on trying to get status earlier. DL is counting on many of them to fly anyway because they're probably captives.