Disagree.
What other airline would have either bothered with such a blog post? None. It's rather clear there are other forces at play here.
You don't see any other reasons why the head of loyalty wrote a blog post, giving the negative reaction this particular devaluation received, particularly due to it happening with no advanced notice??? Perhaps they wanted to do damage control and highlight:
1. We are committed to keeping our program as a competitive advantage
2. We plan on giving notice for future devaluations
3. If you bought miles recently, we'll give you a refund
What ^ said. Of course they had to do
something to cover the damage.
AJ, you think that the following happened today in Alaska's HQ?
9:00 AM: Hi, this is Ibrahim from Emirates, I would like to inform you that we decided that you need to raise your award pricing for our airline and the changes will be as follows. NA-EU 180K for a one way in F instead of 100k, there are more changes, I will email you everything soon. The changes need to take place 10 minutes after you get my email with the final prices. Have a good day.
9:05: Alaska calls an emergency meeting for the IT teem and who not to make the update as quickly as possible.
9:20: All the updates are in place.
10:00: The Alaska HQs starting to get tweets, emails, phone calls from panicked members as to what happened, they answer everyone, sorry it was Emirates who forced us into it.
12:00 PM: The phone rings at Alaska. AS: Hello.
EK: Hi this is Ibrahim again.
AS: Hi.
EK: (in an angry tone) Don't tell me hi now! Why you guys make us look so bad! Why you tell everyone that it is our fault. I warn you. Allahu Akbar.
12:05: AS calls an emergency meeting once again and orders EVERYONE to change the version of the story and tell everyone that IT IS NOT EKs fault. It was due to travel hackers.
12:10 Without thinking too much if the new reason makes sense, AS changes the story, writes up a blog post and yalla.
Or AJ wait for my next post to what happened and you will get to decide as to what really happened.