Delta Flyer With 2 Million SkyMiles Says She Can’t Get To France — Is This When Members Finally Wake Up?

Occasionally a Delta Air Lines flyer gets hit with the realization that their entire life collecting SkyMiles has been a lie. Like a slap on the forehead by someone realizing they could have had a V-8, there’s a recognition that they’ve made horrible choices. They did all their spending on a SkyMiles American Express card because they chose to fly Delta, not because they’d given serious thought to actually getting value. And as a result they’ve accepted far less than they would have gotten elsewhere, because Delta just gives customers far less for its points.

To be sure, other airlines have devalued their points too but Delta truly has led the way over the past dozen years towards the enshittification of its loyalty program. And their tradition of offering customers less for their points dates back much further.

And here’s one SkyMiles member, prominent in social media, having just realized it assuming that others will as well and that it will cost Delta. But it hasn’t. I’ve expected that it would matter for many years, and maybe eventually it will, but the fact that it has not yet fundamentally challenges my core models of consumer behavior and microeconomic efficiency.

A travel expert just told me that my @delta mileage and status were worthless and the worst mileage program by 10x. He said 200,000 Chase points or United miles worth more than almost 2 million Delta miles. Said the Delta Amex is the worst mileage credit card. I’m apoplectic!

— Brooke Hammerling (@brooke) May 18, 2026

I agree… I explained that the experience is better than anything else, but they do need to figure out the mileage because more people are gonna figure it out. Like I can’t get to France this summer without paying retail and I have over 2,000,000 miles. Unless I fly multiple legs

— Brooke Hammerling (@brooke) May 19, 2026

It simply does not make sense to earn SkyMiles over other rewards as a currency. I have always said that Delta miles are not worthless. Just are just worth less.

That’s why it simply does not make sense to spend money on a Delta credit card, except to earn status. You may want to have a Delta card (for instance, for the lounge access if you fly Delta enough). But you do not want to use it.

So why have customers stayed with SkyMiles?

• Delta has strong positions in its core markets. Atlanta is an enviable hub, and its market position in ex-Northwest strongholds is unmatched. Northwest executives used to say about the Upper Midwest that ‘it’s cold, it’s dark, no one wants to go there.. but it’s all ours!’
  
• Delta has been seen as the premium airline.
  
• Relatedly, Delta has been the most reliable airline. Before Covid, they almost never cancelled a mainline flight for reasons other than weather.
  
• Customers chose Delta, and were stuck with Delta, so they simply assumed they needed to be part of SkyMiles if they cared about travel rewards. That’s especially true for passengers who traveled enough to earn SkyMiles status.

Scott Kirby began arguing, shortly after joining United Airlines a decade ago, that rebuilding his airline’s domestic strength was important for the credit card business because being the largest carrier in the market would earn an outsized portion of that market’s card adoption and spend – it wasn’t about offering value to consumers, it was mere scale of the airline’s presence.

There’s something to it, but it seems like there shouldn’t be – there might be a lag before consumers learn the difference, but that consumers would ultimately gravitate towards whomever is offering them the greatest value at least along enough of a margin to matter. And yet in airline loyalty that hasn’t seemed to be the case. Maybe the lag is just longer than I ever thought? Or Delta hadn’t pushed consumers far enough, but finally they have?

The status reason to stick with SkyMiles has far less force than it used to, because Delta has led the way in devaluing what they actually deliver for status.

The single most valuable benefit of status has been first class upgrades. Delta Air Lines led the industry in eliminating those. Twenty years ago 90% of first class seats went to upgrades and awards. Ten years ago it was about half.

Now only around 12% of seats are left for SkyMiles elite members. And that means on many routes and flights there are no upgrades at all. And Delta has had more success than any other airline in selling leftover first class seats to once a year flyers – for as little as $26 – rather than making those available complimentary to customers spending $30,000 or more a year with the airline.

Delta has lost its significant reliability advantage over competitors. They never really regained their operational edge post-pandemic. I originally traced this to the loss of their operations guru Gil West in 2020 and turnover of 31% of employees during the pandemic, which meant the loss of organizational knowledge. Now even their President has left.

And it’s that reliability edge – combined with a far greater investment in branding than other airlines – that Delta’s executives say meant that they didn’t need to invest as much in SkyMiles. By contrast, American Airlines has had little else but to retain a strategic focus on ensuring their mileage currency is more valuable. The argument for staying loyal to American from its top management has been domestic schedule and AAdvantage.

Delta’s SkyMiles program has been less rewarding than peers for a quarter century. One of my lines that has stuck best was coining the term ‘SkyPesos’ for their currency, back in 2009. And this was from 2003 when frequent flyers rented a moving billboard to drive around on a truck outside the airline’s annual shareholders meeting:

A decade ago Henry Harteveldt’s consumer research suggested that SkyMiles members had been pushed too far to the point that there would be consequences for the airline, but there weren’t.

And this is one of the greatest challenges to how I think about the world. My mental model is that in the long run, quality matters and value matters.

On the one hand, Delta has the most successful frequent flyer program in terms of generating revenue. But maybe it’s less successful than it should be? In 2019 they signed a 10-year extension of their American Express deal. They projected at the time that deal would generate $7 billion in revenue by 2023. It didn’t – it just missed that target – but it was aided by over 20% pandemic inflation that hadn’t been expected when the deal was announced. In real terms they were more than 20% behind projections.

They were aided by a deal that has run deeper with American Express than American Airlines has had with its cobrand partners, and that United had with Chase (American’s new deal with Citibank inches closer in structure). And they were aided by a faltering American that fell over the last decade from number one in cobrand card spending to number three, and a market presence that declined in key spend markets like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Maybe Delta is running out of headroom. There’s no one left to sell an American Express card to. That’s why free wifi that requires SkyMiles membership is so important, why their Starbucks and Uber partnerships are so important, and why their DraftKings deal that was announced by never implemented could be so important – they need to feed the top of the marketing funnel with new blood because their existing members are tapped out.

In fall 2023 they tried to squeeze existing members to spend far more on their cards but hit a brick wall and walked back program changes as a step too far. They can’t get any more blood from the sone.