Originally Posted by
UncleRico
Little did I know the nightmare of actually using said Skymiles for anything of value.
I earned over 60,000 Skymiles but soon discovered they were useless for what I needed them for which is award travel to Asia. It was impossible to get an award flight for the low mileage option and I couldn't even pay the high mileage price for one-way because DL doesn't do one-way awards. I have completely given up on using my DL miles until they start doing one-way awards. The same miles on AA will easily get me a milesaver round trip to Japan and 10,000 more will get me an all-partner award to just about anywhere else in Asia. In the last two years I have booked two round-trip awards MSY to BKK in JAL Executive Class and Cathay First Class for 110,000 and 135,000 miles respectively. Both booked with the exact dates I wanted. The equivalent could NEVER be done with Skypesos. I would be lucky to get a round-trip economy for 135,000 much less Cathay First.
Agree that the value of DL Skymiles has eroded significantly.
However, it wasn't always so bad. Summer last year I was able to fly MIA-CDG-SVO in biz (AF) and FC (SV) for 80,000 (with a return in AF economy for about 60,000) - tix purchased < 3wks before travel.
No way I could find any deals like that this summer.
OTOH for
domestic flights this summer, there was no comparison between AA and DL. I searched for a number of flights over the summer and was always able to find several MIA-NYC (or NYC-MIA) RT flights with AA for 25,000 miles, often at the last minute. DL was typically 50,000+ miles. And using the DL website was extremely frustrating - for those 50,000+ miles, you would often only be shown 1-stop trips, vs nonstops with AA.