Delta Airlines Archives - Page 3 of 6

Apr 20 2015

Using Flexibility to Find Premium Award Space to Australia and New Zealand

Kenny has written extensively about how Virgin Australia is a bit of a gold mine for travel to Australia/Oceania using Delta or Virgin America miles. Virgin Australia remains the single best way to get to Australia in a premium cabin, provided you have a way to position to the West Coast (since domestic space can be tough to find on DL).

Virgin Australia is definitely the way to go, but if you can’t find space and you’re willing to tolerate some extra time in business class there are other options to get to Australia/NZ. In fact, you can find space using two alliances! The key to the space? Funnily enough, it’s Korea.

Korean Air (Delta or Ultimate Rewards partner) and Asiana (United partner) both are pretty generous about business class award space, specifically on their A380 JFK-ICN routes. I’ve pointed out Asiana’s JFK-ICN award space before but noticed while working for a client that Korean Air is equally generous. The key here is that both Delta and United will allow you to route through Asia to get to Oceania.

In today’s post, I’ll focus on getting to Australia using Star Alliance on Asiana, and later in the week I’ll discuss using Korean Air and Skyteam.

Getting to Australia Using United Miles

Getting to Australia using United miles on Asiana is pretty straightforward. Sometimes, you can just find it through a straight search. For example, if you search JFK-SYD you can find a flight like the following:

Two seats to Sydney via Seoul using United miles on Asiana

You can go to Auckland as well, usually connecting through Sydney.

The mixed cabin is only an economy leg from SYD-AKL, everything else is business

However, sometimes the itinerary through Korea won’t come up automatically. In that case, search for the award space one segment at a time – ensuring that you are spending less than 24 hours in Seoul (anything greater would be considered a stopover – doable if you are booking a round trip but not on a one way. So yes, if you’re booking a round trip you could spend some time in Korea in one direction!).

After you have found the space, run a multi-city search cherry picking for the flights that you know are there (be sure to be careful about the dates you put in). The multi-city itinerary should price at the same cost as a one way, 80,000 miles plus taxes and fees.

160,000 miles is for two people, so 80,000 each (as it should be)

In a worst case scenario, you can call in to book the ticket. If you are trying to avoid the phone fee, you can book one leg online and then use the 24 hour cancellation/change policy to call in and add the segment that you want.

I searched routes from the United States to ICN and found the following:

– There seems to be decent to good business class space availability (except in December) on the flight from ORD-ICN, but it seems you have to use the multi-city itinerary search to piece it together as below. The tougher leg to find business class space in is ICN-SYD, but there are also options to connect through Bangkok on Thai

Again, the price is 160K due to searching for 2 people

– Space is great between SFO-ICN, though some of those flights are on UA metal (save 10,000 miles get a lesser product)

– Space is equally great between SEA-ICN

– As far as I can tell, JFK, ORD, and SFO all feature lie flat business class seats, while the SEA flight is angled flat

– From ICN, Asiana flies to SYD (flat beds as far as I can tell) and this is what availability looked like in Aug-Nov.

Space from ICN-SYD for Aug-Nov. 11 months out looks pretty good too

11 months out space looks really good, and there is pretty great coach availability as well. From SYD you can catch an Air New Zealand flight to NZ – usually in coach but good enough for the shorter flight.

Final Thoughts

Getting to Australia is tough, but routing through Asia can help you get there in a premium cabin. If you book a round trip, you can even stopover in Seoul if you’d like. United miles are your best Star Alliance bet here due to the lower fuel surcharges, but on Aeroplan it’s also 80,000 miles and $300 in taxes and fees each way. Though space isn’t rampant, it’s a lot better than most direct premium class flights. Also note all my searches were for two seats – you might have better luck if you’re only looking for one. Next time I’ll take a look at the Korean Air space doing the same thing – it’s even a shade better.

Jan 10 2015

Some Delta Skymiles 2015 Award Booking Beta Testing: Good and Bad

It's slightly easier to get into these now that Skymiles 2015 is here — It’s slightly easier to get into these now that Skymiles 2015 is here

A couple of things conspired to get me to dust off my old Delta Skymiles login. First, I was searching for award space for a client. It just so happened the day I started, don’t call the airline pointed out that Delta was releasing a surprising amount of partner award space. I’m not sure whether the latter is still going on, though in my research I did see more space than I had in the past. Thirdly, I’ve actually been stockpiling Delta Skymiles in anticipation of 2015 – I’ve never had problem finding space and I wanted the new one way flexibility. Here are some things I’ve learned poking around the website (and calling a few agents) award booking wise for the new Delta.

One piece of good news is that there definitely seem to be more lowest level award seats floating around out there. I found what felt like a lot more than I had found in the past. Which brings me to the other good news – it’s been reported elsewhere but I’ve finally seen it firsthand for myself – the award search engine…works now! There are some crazy things I’ve noticed (crazy because they are functional).

For starters, the website is pretty snappy and responsive which was downright shocking to me. But more importantly, it does a much better job of finding routings and displaying available low award space. If you search flexible dates, you get a nice calendar highlighting the miles required on each day. I’m still kind of amazed having used it myself, Delta used to be so broken. Here’s a 5 week search for LAX-LHR in Business class.

What I’ve found to be unfortunate is Delta is now enforcing routing rules which really restrict your ability to use your miles. In the past, as long as there was low level award space, you could pretty much string together any legs you wanted to get to your final destination. This is no longer the case. Let’s say you wanted to go from LAX to CDG, for example. There is a lot of low level space, even over the summer, to LHR from LAX. Like these flights on 7/14:

For one person it's not too hard to get to LHR from LAX in business class this summer — For one person it’s not too hard to get to LHR from LAX in business class this summer

If you take that top flight, a Virgin Atlantic flight, you could theoretically get to Paris with just one more hop. Doing a quick search for LHR-CDG on 7/15 (first leg is a redeye) yields a ton of award space:

There's also award space on LHR-CDG — There’s also award space on LHR-CDG

In the past, you would be able to string these two flights together in a multi-city search and book the award as one ticket, for 62,500 miles total (low level business award space all the way). However, when I was trying to do that, I kept getting an error message:

delta.com won't do the multi-city search — delta.com won’t do the multi-city search

Finally I called a few times to try to get an agent to ticket the award as one itinerary. I was then informed that Delta has changed its routing rules – you can only route through certain cities to get to certain destinations, and LHR is not an acceptable transit city between LAX and CDG. I wasn’t sure if the agent was making up rules or not, so I decided to do some digging. Unfortunately, it does seem like this statement in Delta’s award rules gives them the right to deny you based on routing:

Boo.

If you don’t feel like clicking to enlarge, it says “Valid routings vary based on the operating carriers of the Award Ticket.” Anyway, not that I’m totally surprised, but this is kind of consumer unfriendly. If there is award space and you’re not like stringing together 6+ legs or something exorbitant, I feel like you should be able to put together itineraries that have low level space on them. I mean, Delta already took away stopovers, but this is essentially taking away layovers. So I was really disappointed to discover this. It seems like to London you need to connect through a Delta hub – ATL, MSP, and SEA all worked.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I’m glad to see that there seems to be more low level space available (even, shockingly, on Delta metal), but losing the ability to create your own routing is pretty big. It’s another instance of Delta giveth and Delta taketh away. Still, I think Delta miles can be very useful, especially to Europe (and especially from Boston – that BOS-AMS flight we took last year seems to have a lot of space). People can keep calling them Skypesos if they’d like, I’ll just keep finding ways to use them. Hopefully my experiences can help some of you out there – let me know in the comments if you’ve found anything else out because I’ve only just started playing with the new system!

Aug 27 2014

Reminder: A Few Good Credit Card Bonuses Going Away Soon (but you probably already know that)

I applied for the Delta Gold personal while I was still in Bavaria

This is a credit card pimping post in the sense that I want to remind people of a limited time chance to sign up for some cards. This is NOT a credit card pimping post in the sense that I don’t have Chase or AMEX affiliate links so I get nothing from doing this. NONE of these links are affiliate links, I found them via Google but if for some reason you don’t trust me feel free to Google for links yourself. Saverocity readers are savvy and I’m sure everyone has heard of these offers, but personally I’ve always found I’ve needed reminders in order to not miss the good ones from time to time. Please also remember to do your own due diligence as well and don’t apply blindly. Also DON’T APPLY if you can’t pay your credit card bills in full every month.

United Mileage Plus Explorer Card: 50K bonus miles after $2000 in 3 months, $50 statement credit

Personal Card

If you click the above link before September 2nd, you should be taken to a landing page offering 50,000 United Miles after $2000 in spending. The $95 annual fee is waived the first year and you receive a $50 statement credit on first purchase. Some other benefits worth considering to me:

– No foreign transaction fees

– 1 free checked bag on domestic itineraries (does not stack with other free checked bags you have via other means)

– 5,000 bonus miles for adding an authorized user within 3 months <= easy money

Some things to note, via Chase: “This new cardmember bonus offer is not available to either (i) current cardmembers of this consumer credit card, or (ii) previous cardmembers of this consumer credit card who received a new cardmember bonus for this consumer credit card within the last 24 months.”

So don’t try to apply if you have the personal version of this card already or if you received the bonus for this card within the last 24 months.

As a point of reference, I signed up for this card in February 2012 and I just applied for it again.

United Business First seat — If you can get business class on United metal the price is still pretty good

Some reasons not to get this card? Well, if you don’t have any Ultimate Rewards points, 50,000 United miles aren’t going to do you too much good on their own. I try to sign up for cards as part of a strategy for my next year (or two). I’ve got around 100,000 Ultimate Rewards points lying around, so adding the 50,000 I get from this card plus some spending should get us one way to Europe in business class at worst (or roundtrip in coach).

I’d especially encourage you to think it through if there are other Chase cards you are interested in – Chase has a LOT of good cards in my opinion. So make sure the card fits into your overall strategy and don’t just apply for the heck of it. That being said, 50,000 mile bonuses don’t grow on trees anymore so keep that in mind! Though there is one more…

Delta Gold Skymiles Card (Personal and Business): 50K bonus miles after spending $1000 in 3 months, $50 statement credit after first Delta purchase

Landing Page for Both Personal and Business Version

The above page has links to both the personal and business versions of the card; the improved bonus expires 9/8. They both have the same bonus and spending requirements – $1000 for 50,000 in 3 months. They both also come with a $50 statement credit after your first Delta purchase within three months. $95 fee waived for the first year on both. Other benefits worth considering to me:

– Free checked bag

A huge list. I have a bunch of caveats for these cards.

First and foremost, the terms on the personal card say this: “If we identify you as currently having an American Express® Card account, you may not be eligible for this welcome bonus offer. This offer is also not available to applicants who have or have had this product.”

I can tell you for sure that if you have had this card before, don’t expect to get the sign up bonus. What I’m not sure about is whether you’ll get it if you currently have another AMEX account. Again, full disclosure, I applied for the personal version of this card – I am just hoping that the “may” in the “may not be eligible” clause has me covered. I am fairly confident that the bonus will come through, but who knows. So, I applied for this card even though I have other AMEX cards; please think about whether you feel comfortable according to the terms and conditions before you do.

A second thing to note is that you only get the $50 statement credit if you make a Delta purchase – the terms say it has to be coded by Delta. I’m going to try to buy a movie or a drink or something on my Delta flight next week and see if that triggers the credit. If not, I am going to try to buy a $50 Delta e-certificate. I think both those transactions should do the trick, but I don’t know. I’m just telling you it’s not as simple as in the United offer.

For the business card, the terms are a bit more lenient: “Welcome bonus offer not available to applicants who have or have had this product within the last 12 months.”

I applied for one of these too, just so you know. Everything else is pretty much the same. There’s a 50,000 bonus on the Delta Platinum card as well, but a higher $195 annual fee that’s not waived. That’s a hard pass for me, but in case you’re interested.

Some reasons not to get this card? If you don’t have any AMEX Membership Rewards to transfer and top off your account (and don’t forget those transfers cost money), or aren’t going to apply for both (if you’re going to do that, I think you should apply on different days and you’re running out of time), then having 50,000 Skymiles lying around is kind of useless. Also, if you get frustrated trying to redeem Skymiles, then don’t bother – though here are some posts to help you.

Personally, I got both cards (one a few weeks ago, the other a few days ago), and plan on using the 100,000 in conjunction with the 30,000 Skymiles I already have in the bank. That’s enough for two one-way business class tickets to Europe – I’m just counting on Skymiles 2015 one way redemptions to not be a complete mess (ha!). If they are, I’m diversified enough; I’m not relying on them. You may have noticed that by applying for the United Explorer card and these two cards I have basically set us up to get to Europe next year for vacation (Jess has enough Skymiles in her account for a third ticket). I’m not banking on using these, but I’m using them to create options, which is important since we’ll likely travel in the summer.

Edited to add: It’s best to apply in an incognito browser or window – AMEX has cookie issues sometimes

Final Thoughts

I wrote this post because I think these credit card offers are worth strong consideration. I don’t think you should apply for them blindly and I hope I’ve laid out some of the risks you should be considering when deciding whether to apply or not. I applied for the United card and both the personal and business Delta Gold, but literally pondered for days and mapped out how they would fit into my overall travel plans next year (potentially). Please be especially mindful if you decide to apply for the Delta cards due to AMEX’s increasingly stringent conditions. And again, don’t apply if you can’t pay off your bills in full every month. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments!

Aug 18 2014

The DIY Guide to Booking Award Tickets – Part XIII: Booking an Award Ticket on delta.com (Advanced Techniques)

You don't have to restrict your trip to just London using Skymiles — You don’t have to restrict your trip to just London using Skymiles

People have different opinions when it comes to booking award tickets with frequent flyer miles. I, for one, love booking award tickets and enjoy the challenge that comes with doing so. Booking award tickets are like puzzles to me and I love solving them. Other people hate booking award tickets, consider them too much of a hassle, or even go so far as to believing their frequent flyer miles are completely worthless. I’ve decided to put a guide together for those of you who fall in between – people who want to book award tickets themselves but feel like they need some pointers. This guide will assume some basic knowledge, namely, that you know how to log in to your frequent flyer account and check your mileage balance. Other than that, the guide is here to help you through the process – hope you find it useful! Feel free to refer to the index at the bottom of the page for other entries.

In my last post I shared some tips I’ve learned over the years about booking flights on delta.com. Today we’ll look at a few techniques that can really help you stretch the value of your Delta Skymiles. This “advanced techniques” post assumes you are comfortable with the strategies outlined in the past post and will just focus on the cold, hard results. Delta’s Skymiles program has a pretty generous policy when it comes to stopovers and open jaws. That’s right, Delta is generous. Wow.

We haven’t covered this yet although I’ve covered it elsewhere – a stopover is generally defined as a stop in a connecting city for longer than 24 hours. An open jaw is when you depart from an airport other than the one you landed in, when you return to a different airport from where you started, or both! Here are some simple examples:

Stopover: A => B (hang out for longer than 24 hours) => C => A. You fly through B to get to your final destination, C, but hang out there for awhile before continuing your journey.

Open jaw: A => B // C => A. For this open jaw, you’d find your own way from B to C (train, drive, whatever), but fly back home to A from C. It’s actually easier to visualize open jaws using maps.

This is an "open jaw" (fly into LHR, fly out of CDG) [gcmap.com] — This is an “open jaw” (fly into LHR, fly out of CDG) [gcmap.com]

Another open jaw - you fly out of Boston, but ultimately return to ATL [gcmap.com] — Another open jaw – you fly out of Boston, but ultimately return to ATL [gcmap.com]

Here are some ideas for how you can extend your trip, and thus the value of your Skymiles, by utilizing Delta’s allowed open jaw and stopover.

Extension 1: Visit more places in Europe

This is probably my preferred extension. Remember Delta allows both an open jaw and a stopover. This gives you the opportunity to visit 3 cities for (almost) the price of one. How? Well, in the example in my previous post I just did a simple trip to London (which of course wasn’t simple thanks to delta.com). But let’s say you wanted to go to Paris – you could stopover in London along the way. Suddenly you’ve increased the number of destinations you’re hitting from one to two.

You can stopover on any city on the way to your destination as long as it’s a legal routing. How do you know a routing is legal? If you can have a layover in a city on the way to your destination according to delta.com, you can have a stopover there. I took the liberty of doing a bunch of segment by segment searches – London is indeed a city you can connect through to get to Paris. Thus, it would be legal on Delta to fly from Boston to London, stopover, and then continue on to Paris before returning to Boston. The great thing is, this costs the same as the Boston to London round trip ticket.

A legal itinerary on a Delta award ticket [gcmap.com]

But why stop there? Remember, Delta allows a stopover and an open jaw. That means you can hit a third city and still not pay any more miles. The only caveat here is you’d have to find a way to get to the third city on your own, but there are plenty of ways to do that (plane, train, car, boat, whatever). What this means is I could fly back to Boston from Amsterdam and it would still be the same price. That’s right, I could do London, Paris, and Amsterdam, all for the same cost in miles plus whatever it costs me to get to Amsterdam (hitchhike?)

It is no less annoying to search for and book this award ticket on delta.com than it was to book the Boston to London round trip. BUT – it’s also no MORE annoying. You use the same exact techniques; search segment by segment, fly economy on short haul if you have to, and then string everything together using a multi-city award search. I don’t normally link to the same post three times but seriously, if you need a refresher: here. I went through all the steps and you can see my results below (I built it the same way I did the last itinerary, business on the outbound and economy return). As you can see, it’s the same number of miles and just a shade more in taxes and fees.

Original itinerary, 92,500 miles per person and (click to enlarge) — Original itinerary, 92,500 miles and $214 per person and (click to enlarge)

Adding Paris and Amsterdam still costs 92,500 miles and just $4 more (click to enlarge)

This is what I would call a great value. It’s also the kind of thing you usually can’t pull off with cash tickets. You can spread the flights out over the course of a year if you’d like – hey, take a year off and go explore Europe! Backpacking from Paris to Amsterdam could be fun! The fact that you have a year to complete your itinerary plays into the second extension you could make to the original trip.

Extension 2: The “free” one-way

Free one-ways are misnamed a bit. They’re not really free – you give up the chance to hit multiple cities in Europe. But what you gain is the ability to take care of half the flights of your next (usually domestic) vacation. The concept of the free one-way is relatively simple: You take your regular round trip award flight, but you tack on one more flight before or after that round trip award. So you are either tacking on a return flight from somewhere to your hometown before the main trip or tacking on an outbound flight from your hometown to somewhere you want to go after the main trip.

We added a "free" one-way to our Europe trip (in blue) [gcmap.com] — We added a “free” one-way to our Europe trip (in blue) [gcmap.com]

I’ll use an example from my own experience. As you know, we just got back from Germany and Austria. Well, in a couple weeks, as part of that same award ticket, Jess and I are flying from Boston to Los Angeles for a wedding. We essentially knocked out half the flight cost on a trip we were going to take anyway. That’s why people call these “free” one-ways.

Example of a "free" one-way, adding a flight to Atlanta after the main trip [gcmap.com] — Example of a “free” one-way, adding a flight to Atlanta after the main trip [gcmap.com]

How does it work, technically? Well it only works smoothly in programs where you are allowed an open jaw AND a stopover (in other programs you can get it done, but with complications). Delta is one such program. Here is the example I did for this post: BOS-LHR-BOS-ATL. I took the same round trip from the original itinerary to and from London. However, a week later, I searched for a one way flight to Atlanta. Then, using the multi-city search, I tacked it onto the original itinerary (by starting from scratch). It came out, once again, to the same price in miles and a little more in taxes and fees. That’s because you technically use your stopover in Boston and then use your open jaw to end somewhere different than where you began. Tricksy.

Again, only $6 more expensive - cheaper than any cash flight you'd ever pay — Again, only $6 more expensive – cheaper than any cash flight you’d ever pay

So, you can go to London and back, and then later, take that trip to the Coca Cola factory you’ve been dreaming of (or go visit your in-laws, or whatever you need to do in Atlanta). There are some combinations of cities and destinations for which this doesn’t work, but in general, if the routing seems to make sense (aka you’re going in generally the same direction), Delta will allow it. It takes work, you need to search segment by segment again, but hey – you generally don’t need to talk to a phone agent. So if you don’t want to gallivant around Europe (or don’t have the time), but know you need to get somewhere else in the USA within a year – try to tack on the flight!

Final Thoughts

Hopefully this post gives you some ideas about how to stretch the value of your Delta Skymiles even further. Some creativity can yield some pretty big dividends. Plus, I saved the best for last – all these tricks work for domestic award itineraries on Delta as well (unlike every other program I know of). That really increases the value of domestic award redemption on Delta, even in premium cabins (which usually are a bad deal domestically). Take my word for it – play around with Delta’s award booking system and get used to it – there are gems to be had.

Index

Part I: Know Why Award Tickets Exist

Part II: Know Your Award Types and Charts

Part III: Know Your Airline Alliances and Partners

Part IV: Using Wikipedia to Determine Alliance Partners

Part V: Using united.com to Search for Star Alliance Award Space

Part VI: Using ANA to Search for Star Alliance Space

Part VII: Searching for Award Space Segment by Segment

Part VIII: Searching for Oneworld Award Space on aa.com

Part IX: Searching for Oneworld Award Space on ba.com

Part X: Using Wikipedia to Determine Airline Routes

Part XI: Searching Skyteam Award Space using Air France/KLM’s Flying Blue Website

Part XII: Tips for Booking an Award Ticket on delta.com

Part XIII: Booking an Award Ticket on delta.com (Advanced Techniques)

Aug 17 2014

The DIY Guide to Booking Award Tickets – Part XII: Tips for Booking an Award Ticket on delta.com

Skymiles don't have to be Skypesos if you use them correctly — Skymiles don’t have to be Skypesos if you use them correctly

To put it quite simply: delta.com is pretty broken when it comes to award searches and bookings. In fact, it’s one of the reasons people hate Delta Skymiles – they believe (incorrectly) that it’s impossible to book a ticket at low level prices or get so frustrated that they don’t bother trying. For awhile, it was easy to avoid Delta – they were the first to devalue their award chart so for awhile their premium awards were too expensive. Everyone has since devalued their charts (AA/US coming for sure), so Delta has more or less fallen back in line with the pack. This doesn’t solve the problem of how difficult it is to book awards or search for award space on delta.com – but hopefully this entry into the DIY Guide will help with that.

Delta's business class seats are actually pretty comfortable - it's booking them that's the problem — Delta’s business class seats are actually pretty comfortable – it’s booking them that’s the problem

This post will be a little bit different. For most award search engines, I don’t need to use red circles or anything like that – you can figure it out on your own. Delta is a different type of beast, though. So what I will do is go through a mock award booking step by step. Almost every step highlights either a delta.com quirk, a delta.com tip, or something I feel you need to know in order to be successful with Delta. This is long, but hopefully there should be a lot of useful stuff in here for you. I’ll summarize at the end as well. Here we go!

Tip 1: You can’t trust the delta.com award calendar

So I decided just to search for a round trip for two (searching for one person is always a lot easier – but a lot less true to real life award travel) between Boston and London in October. My first tip for you if you’re going to use delta.com – don’t trust the award calendar. There are three colors that display on the calendar – green is good, yellow is bad, blue is horrible (they stand for low, medium, and high cost awards respectively). However, the calendar will not always display green even if there is a low level award available. This commonly happens in two circumstances:

1) There is a flight on a Skyteam partner that you can take – these always price at low level but the delta.com award calendar conveniently ignores their existence

2) Any time one flight on an itinerary is only available at the medium or high price, the entire itinerary prices at that higher cost

The calendar is a lie (click to enlarge)

The reality is, there is a decent amount of award space on Delta flights flying transatlantic to Europe – it’s the domestic legs that have abysmal low level availability. If you were to click through on October 8th, you would see that delta.com doesn’t show any low level award space in business class to London from Boston – but that doesn’t mean it’s true. How can you find that space? Tip 2.

Tip 2: When flying transatlantic (or far in general), if you can’t find low level space from your home airport, start by searching from Delta hubs. Then search any other Delta airport that flies directly to where you want to go.

This isn’t a hard and fast rule but I find it works more often than not. Most of Delta’s longhaul flights originate from hubs, generally with more than one flight to the big destinations per day. There is going to be a better chance for award space from a city that has two flights to London per day than a city that only has one. When I’m doing this, I generally search JFK, DTW, MSP, LAX, SLC, SEA – in that order (I’m coming from Boston).

One way search from a Delta hub... — One way search from a Delta hub… (click to enlarge)

The trick here is, you just want to find low level award space from any city in the United States. Remember, it’s best practice to search for one way segments, and for Delta we’ll start with the longhaul transatlantic one. In this case, I didn’t have to go past DTW – there are two seats in business class on the DTW-LHR flight. Now that I had found low level award space, it was time to look for a flight from Boston to DTW aka Tip 3.

Tip 3: After you find low level award space from anywhere, find low level space from your home city to the transatlantic gateway – in economy if you have to

Basically, the existence of the low level award space on the DTW-LHR flight told me this – as long as I could get to my transatlantic gateway, DTW, using low level awards, I’d be able to fly all the way to London only paying the low price (that’s how Delta works). So now I just searched BOS-DTW – no domestic first class low level award space. But, do I really need to fly in first class for short haul flights? Personally, I don’t, so I repeated the search, except for economy.

This low level domestic first class flight doesn't get us to DTW in time — This low level domestic first class flight doesn’t get us to DTW in time

Bingo – if I’m willing to take two legs (through Cincinnati), I can get to Detroit in economy on low level awards in time for the longhaul flight to London. Now I realize that this might not be ideal for everyone, especially if you have kids. Two years ago I would have dragged Jess on this type of itinerary with me – now, I would never consider it. But it’s an option for using your Delta Skymiles at a good rate. That’s what’s important.

Moreover…

Tip 4: If Delta changes your flights by more than an hour, you can almost always change to more convenient flights for free

Delta has a pretty generous schedule change rule which you can read here. They’re also notorious for changing their schedules all the time. I also find their agents are generally pretty understanding when schedule or equipment changes happen. Therefore, yes I would be booking a two leg journey to get to my transatlantic gateway, but I’d monitor my flights and if Delta changes my schedule enough I’ll ask for a change. This works with all airlines, but in my experience I have found Delta to be one of the more accommodating ones. Still, in a worst case scenario I’m taking two short haul flights to lie flat on my way across the Atlantic.

Tip 5: You can mix classes (business/economy) on Delta awards and your round trip price will be the average cost

Unlike some other airlines, you can mix classes on your outbound and return and the cost of your trip will be the average of the two award levels. So I decided to search for an economy flight home. As you can see, there is no low level availability on October 16th. Or is there? Like I said in Tip 1: never trust this stupid calendar. Clicking through will reveal that there is a direct Virgin Atlantic flight to Boston with low level economy space!

Delta hides partner award space below its own flights, even cheaper partner awards, so make sure you select “Miles per passenger” as the method for organizing the flights (I’ll hit on this more in my forthcoming delta.com advanced techniques post). So now I’ve found low level space in business one way to London, and in economy back. Time to book.

Change "best match" to "Miles per passenger" to make sure the lowest level flights are at the top — Change “best match” to “Miles per passenger” (not pictured) to make sure the lowest level flights are at the top

Tip 6: Use a multi-city search to piece together your entire award segment by segment

As you search for your award low level segment by low level segment, write down every single low level award flight you want to take. After you’ve determined the flights you want to take, you’ve finished the hard part. Now it’s time for the fun part – booking! To do this, you want to pull up delta.com’s lovely award search tool yet again, but this time you want to do a multi-city itinerary.

The multi-city award search is surprisingly functional (click to enlarge)

Take every single segment you found and plug it in. In this case it would be BOS-CVG, CVG-DTW, DTW-LHR, and LHR-BOS. Instead of searching by “price”, ask the system to search by “schedule”. Now start your search! For each segment, you will be given a list of flights to choose from – including all low, medium, and high level award flights! Which ones do you choose?

You'll see a list like this - click on the flights you wrote down — You’ll see a list like this – click on the flights you wrote down

Well, I think you know the answer to that. But just in case – look for the flights that you wrote down that you know have low level award space and choose them! Remember to be sure to choose economy for the flights that only had low level in economy – you can’t make a single mistake otherwise the itinerary won’t price correctly.

But if you do it right – suddenly you have a low level Delta award! As you can see, this priced out to 92,500 miles round trip (Delta doesn’t allow one way awards until 2015). That is exactly the average of a round trip business and economy class low level award to Europe: (125,000 + 60,000) / 2 = 92,500. Delta even automatically upgraded the BOS-CVG leg to domestic first because low level space was available (never seen that before, btw!)

Review

Hopefully you’ve followed along okay, but here’s a quick review of the tips (paraphrased) outlined in this post.

Tip 1: Friends don’t let friends trust delta.com’s award calendar

Tip 2: Find low level transatlantic space first, even if it’s not from your hometown

Tip 3: Find low level award space from your hometown to the city in Tip 2, “downgrading” to economy if that gets you in a low level award if necessary

Tip 4: Delta schedule changes are your friend – if they mess with your flights too much you can probably switch to more convenient ones

Tip 5: You can mix class of service and save some miles if you want

Tip 6: Piece your entire itinerary together piece by piece in the multi-city award search to book

Final Thoughts

Honestly, I kind of forgot how much I enjoy booking Delta awards. It’s like hunting for big game in Africa or something, the thrill is in the challenge. I actually cherry picked a fairly easy itinerary – there are a lot tougher ones out there but I just wanted to illustrate my points. Hopefully this post shows you that you can book low level Delta awards! Is it tedious? Yes. Is it annoying? Yes. Do you have to sometimes take weird routings? Yes. Is it worth it? Well, that’s up to you. Personally, I think it is. Delta Skymiles are cheap to earn, the devil is in burning them at low level prices. Hopefully this post helps you on your way to doing just that.

I haven’t even gotten to the fun stuff you can do yet. Delta allows both an open jaw and a stopover on award tickets – something you can take advantage of to extend the value of your miles. I’ll hit on that in my next DIY post involving advanced Delta award booking techniques. Should be a real cracker! (Hopefully at least a few of you watch soccer and get the reference).

Index

Part I: Know Why Award Tickets Exist

Part II: Know Your Award Types and Charts

Part III: Know Your Airline Alliances and Partners

Part IV: Using Wikipedia to Determine Alliance Partners

Part V: Using united.com to Search for Star Alliance Award Space

Part VI: Using ANA to Search for Star Alliance Space

Part VII: Searching for Award Space Segment by Segment

Part VIII: Searching for Oneworld Award Space on aa.com

Part IX: Searching for Oneworld Award Space on ba.com

Part X: Using Wikipedia to Determine Airline Routes

Part XI: Searching Skyteam Award Space using Air France/KLM’s Flying Blue Website