dd1612

Thank you 3Cforme!

This has happened twice .... and with the Diamond medallion desk!

I have a 2nd ticket for 8/6/12 outbound MSP-ORD (Paid) and ORD-CDG-FCO in Coach and FCO-AMS-ORD in BE + ORD-MSP (Paid).

Why cannot Delta train it's CS agents, especially the agents that answer the DM line?

Unnecssary costs of paid tickets, no 1st class seats, and additional baggage charges plus (unnecessary) comments from the Check-in agent at the SkyPriority lane at MSP about weight of each bag, when the BE allows 2 bags free of charge.

roknroll

I agree with you and I highly encourage you to send a complaint to Delta over the incompetence of their phone agent, highlighting the fact that it cost you money out of pocket when those legs should have been free. This should have easily been assembled into a single award ticket.

In the future, I would encourage you to hold off when an agent tells you it can't be done, especially if you know/feel it should be do-able. In this situation, as a DM, you could have booked the ORD-AMS-FCO round trip and then called back to get another agent, telling them you want to add on a leg to the start and end of your trip. As a DM there would be no charge for changes.

3Cforme

I have a feeling it's a bad award reservation search system and process(es) as much as the possibility of bad training or agent work ethic.

Unsolicited - and as recently as yesterday - agents have told me there's a new res system on the way.

If everybody making a critical post on FlyerTalk about Delta award searching* had instead written a letter to Delta execs, this could have been fixed long ago.

* quality/ease of award search isn't the same as great low band award availability

dd1612

Two separate letters have been mailed out today to Delta - Skymiles Account Support with accompanying documentation of itineraries and charges incurred.

Let's see whether they will respond and if they do, what will be the response!

mtkeller

For those following the saga of this OMA-AKL//HKG-OMA award ticket, I finally had a chance to call in to get the taxes/fees reduced from ~$712. First agent called supervisor and only managed to get listing of what everything is. I told him I understood the codes but doubted the astronomical YQ ($321.80) and YR ($250) were correct. His supervisor decided it was over her head so called in international rates and reissues. That agent did a lot of investigating and thought she had figured out who was charging the YQ and who was charging the YR, but once she said that some of the YQ/YR was for PVG-NRT-ATL-OMA on DL metal, I pointed out that they shouldn't be collecting it on an award ticket. She doesn't normally do award tickets, so she called a guru at SkyMiles support who got into the nitty-gritty of the tariffs and fare rules with her. Basically, the charts make no sense and contain all sorts of disclaimers about being changed willy-nilly. The SkyMiles support person did think that things appeared off, so she is forwarding a case to a tariff assist analyst (they were already closed for the day when I called). I'm supposed to get a call back in a couple of days with either an explanation or a refund.

michael_v

Keep us posted!

Redeemed

After way too many hours of trying to find an award itinerary to work (5 passengers) I managed to find 5 first/business class seats at low level to Athens from my small midwest town (connecting through MSP and ORD). The ORD-ATH connects through CDG on Air France. We needed to fund this award trip through 2 Skymiles accounts and after booking the first 3 seats the same CDG-ATH segment disappeared and so 2 of us are on a later CDG-ATH flight. We can manage with this but just wondering if we would have any success calling to see if the same segment is available? Also on the return flight home we could only get as far as ORD as there were no low level award seats available. We are fine with flying in the Economy section for these legs- can I call to get them to add these on at no additional mileage cost? Note the economy awards are all medium level. Does the fact that there are higher mileage requirements for first/business even out with higher award level cost?

3Cforme

No, it does not. If you add Medium coach to Low business the award from destination back to origin will price as Medium Business.

mtkeller

Actually, it might break the fare and offer low business plus medium domestic coach. Depending on regions, this can be cheaper than medium business or more expensive. I ran into this recently on a US-SW Pacific//N Asia-US redemption where the agent couldn't see the low Y I was trying to combine with partners and low J. Rather than forcing everything up to medium J, it gave medium Y to the gateway and then low J beyond that and added things. If the TPAC flight had been on DL metal, however, I suspect it might have pushed everything up to medium.

GrizShel

Getting multiple errors all over the place in Europe that Delta and its online partners bookable for award tickets online don't fly to all kinds of places such as Oslo, Nice, Trondheim, Stockholm, Bordeaux, etc. This was working a few weeks ago but back to not working. Almost never can get KLM over the Atlantic flights to show. Only cities where Delta flies to themselves seem to reliably show up as valid destinations.

Switch to an Asia-US search:
Taipei - DCA on August 29 is showing low availability in business class but get "sold out" message when clicked on. Try to break this out by segments, and still get the same problem, but the kicker here is that Delta.com often won't display the nonstop flights (this has been a longstanding intermittent problem with segment by segment searches, for a while it worked very well a year or two ago, but that was too efficient I guess and they had to put a stop to making it too easy to find award space online). For example, if you try to search for NRT-JFK, ns is not shown, you may get something like NRT-MSP-JFK, which will also show low availability, but will show the "sold out" message when you click on to select the flights.
Or if you select NRT-LAX (since LAX-DCA is available on AS), it does show the ns, but it says it is in "business class + others" even though it is only one flight! (I guess they boot you back to economy midway over the Pacific). And still the dreaded "sold out" message when you click on it.

What an awful, awful mess!

transparent

I just tried to book a flight from BKK to ATL, connecting in NRT and DTW with a similar thought of booking economy for one leg to keep low level biz.

NRT-ATL is available on the date in question with low level business.

BKK-NRT no low level business available, so I tried on the phone to book that leg in economy.

Agent said since only medium level economy is available, the system reprices the entire trip as medium, even though one leg is in economy and at the 40K level.

Is this the way it's supposed to work? Has anyone found a way around this? Doesn't seem right that a medium economy leg would reprice the business class leg to medium as well when low is available.

mtkeller

That's the way it works. All DL with one part at medium and one part at low prices the whole thing as medium in the higher class of service even if the medium part is Y and should be cheaper than low J. If you mix medium with partner, you'll get a fare break since they can't include partner segments under a medium/high award fare code. Have you considered a partner for NRT-BKK? It will likely cost you a few bucks in fuel surcharges (not too bad, as the intra-Asian fuel surcharges are generally pretty reasonable), but save a ton in miles.

transparent

Haven't looked into partners yet-- thanks for the idea! Had written them off due to the high fuel surcharges that I was reading about!

Now to actually find availability...

3Cforme

A routing ATL-NRT-xxx-BKK is probably going to require an overnight, too, that ATL-NRT-BKK on Delta would not.

wco81

If you find individual TATL segments on the one-way search, will they always show up in the multi-city search as suggested by the first post?