Indeed they do have a grand vision for the FF program of the future...you are seeing the first part of it before your eyes...anyone want to opine that in 10 years or less, FF programs will be ancient history?


Boil the frog, slowly.

FF programs as we know them will have changed. The patterns seem to indicate that the flying portion of RDM/EQM accrual is going down, while the portion of RDM/EQM via commerce is going up.

How do you get them? How do you use them?

Perhaps the thread title should be "More Negative Flight Mileage Change Coming?". If the CC/hotel/etc promotions are any indication, RDMs/EQMs aren't going anywhere.

Brand loyalty and rewards programs have an interesting 5-10 years ahead of them. There will be lots of changes, for the airlines, for the hotel chains... for the grocery stores. FT/FW/SD will just find the most out of balance, and those that benefit the most the consumer side of the relationship. With as many airlines as there are, one of them is going to offer more-for-less, in one way or another, and the others will find some way to follow (or not follow).

I agree, but I don't think they can go all the way down that road (BA EC) here in the US. It's a much better fit when most of your flights are long-haul with international business class product... not so much so when you've got a huge domestic network that has to "compete" with WN, and a population that largely prides itself on disinterest in anything beyond its own borders.

The latter part is definitely true for DL.

Remember the pudding guy?

never mind "loyal". Take this word out and your post would be closer to reality.

I will stick by an earlier comment made elsewhere: DL and AF clearly think they are now sufficiently big in terms of market share to be much less interested in chasing individual rather than corporate customers. Basically, giving perks at the "bulk traveler" rather than "retail traveler" level. With exceptions, the individual tiered traveler is just small fry.

has someone seriously not thought that perhaps they will start giving out only partial EQMs for discount fare classes?

Interesting point.

If DLNW can make $6050 profit selling a $7000 J class ticket to someone who hates DL and only flies them once a year because they have to, why should they reward someone else with elite status who is "loyal" but has a negative contribution margin after flying on less than $4000 of heavily discounted and mistake fare tickets, spends hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars in payroll costs hogging the CSR lines with constantly changing award tickets and makes a sport out of profiting from every loophole in the FFP to be found?

I agree this is the next logical step, but also logically they would have rolled this out at the same time as reducing EQM on cheaper fares. According to posts in the DL forum, though, all fare classes will earn 100% EQMs next year. The way DL has handled this roll-out is laughingly bad.

They can't fill the premium cabin with $7000 customers, that is reality. That is the reason they offer $4000 discount fares and use the remaining seats as a marketing tool for the AL via FF program awards. Turn the question around: Why would DL NOT use the empty seats to as a marketing tool. reduced margins are better than no margins at all.

The $4000 (or $2500 for that matter depending on how smart someone is) I was referring to was someone making PLT but generating little to not profit on deeply discounted, low profit economy tickets versus one passenger not giving a damn about PLT or earning award miles making the airline a $6000 profit on one flight. Which kind of customer should a best customer program try to attract and please? If those customers are less motivated by a FFP, what are they motivated by?

However, to your point, there is also a big difference between a $4000 discount biz fare and giving the seats away as a marketing tool. Turn the question around:

Why would DL not reduce the size of the business cabin if it is found to be structurally too large? Or why not replace it with a denser economy plus seating that is less subject to corporate policy restrictions and has a lower price differential?

It is possible that the most profitable Skymiles customers are those that send DL lots of partner revenue, fly once in a while and either never redeem their miles or do so in a non-savvy way blowing them at high rates with high fees. It is possible that the least profitable Skymiles customers are the ones that frequent this forum and know how to work the program to their advantage. If you were designing a program to contribute to profitability which customer would you go after and which one would you try to frustrate?

I really do think this is just a simple matter of the airlines realizing:

- EQMs cost almost nothing to create
- They have value
- People who don't value them won't care if you take them away
- People who do value them will do things to get them

I doubt many people buy a B or Y fare because of the 50% bonus. Why give 50% bonus miles when you could make that person use a credit card from a bank that buys EQM off you for cash at 100% margin?

You almost never want to frustrate customers.

$4,000 on deeply discounted fares is still $4,000. If the airline didn't want to sell those fares at those prices, then it wouldn't price them that way - but the fact is, in order to pay to move the planes around, the airline needs nearly full planes. And a plane full of passengers on K fares is better than a plane with 4 people who paid $7k any day of the week.

See: Southwest. Low fares, but full planes.


If you can count on a passenger to regularly fill a seat on your plane at the prices you are charging, that's a good thing. Is it as good as a passenger who pays $7,000 for one seat? No, but you're not going to keep an airline afloat with those types of passengers alone.

In the past, I've wanted to purchase a B fare and upgrade with miles to WBC. The problem however, is that often the upgrade seat wasn't available when I had to make a decision on what fare class to buy. Do you buy the more expensive B fare class hoping that maybe the upgrade seat would open up later? Yes, I did that because at a minimum, I knew I would at least get 150% EQM's in case that upgrade seat never became available later.

Now with this change, my incentive to buy the B fare class is gone. Dumb move Delta!

... Because another, smarter, airline IS going to give the bonus and snatch away that high rev passenger.

I think what a lot of people on both sides are missing is that there are a lot of pax who DO care about ff programs but are not that knowledgable on them. It sometimes takes a while for changes like DL is doing to sink in to them, but they will evenually. DL is setting up a slow motion train wreck. It's the Rob Borden fiasco all over again.

A good example is two colleagues from the organization I work for who were in my country the past few days. We went to dinner last night and the topic of travel back to a conference in the states we will all be attending soon came up. Both of them were NW elites, both silvers now although one had been a plat for several years while he held a position in which he flew about 200K miles a year. Neither reads FT, but both had decided when they heard about the DL merger that it would likely seriously screw up the NW program. One had a personal bad experience with SM in the past. They said that this time they were not even going to bother specifying NW as their choice of airline as they always had done in the past and assumed that our travel office would do its usual when no specific airline is requested and put them on UA. Neither was aware that they could comp status to another airline or at least do a challenge. They were just going to abandon NW and go with the flow of what our travel office prefers, which is UA. They did not know the details of how DL had screwed up the NW program, only that DL would certainly be in the process of doing that. One, fortunately, had started burning his miles when he heard that both airlines had agreed on the merger and was down to a number that no longer equalled a free ticket. The other had assumed he still had a while to do that and was not happy to learn that DL had already lowered the boom.

Since our organization is active in over 70 countries and has a lot of air travel, and we have a choice of airlines if we assert it to our travel office, I think it is time for me to put another post on our intranet to let other expats know the more recent details of DL's shananigans and also their options to bail out before they get any more travel booked.

IMHO there is a large group of flyers to whom these issues do matter but they do not have a means of keeping up with them. Getting the message out through efforts like www.saveskymiles.com or www.dlsucks.com can eventually derail DL management's train. The key is to reach those pax who do not read FT.

I hope we can help JeffBob go the way of Robby Boy!

For what it is worth, this was just confirmed over on the DL board.