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Old Jun 23, 2011 | 6:00 am
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DeltaFan4Now
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Originally Posted by kristo
Greetings,

Thanks to my work and my Amex card, I have now accumulated $195k skymiles flying with Delta.

My wife suggested that we use the miles to fly to Paris next summer.

According to the Skymiles award chart (http://dmn.delta.com/skymiles/direct/charts/us49/), I have enough miles ("162,500") to fly in Business class to France.

But when I started playing with the "pay with miles" feature on Delta.com, it confused the heck out of me.

Two "pay with miles" business class r/t tickets for April 2012 only allow for $650 discount, even though I have plenty of miles to use...

How would you go about using your skymiles to go to France? Can you provide some pointers.

Thanks in advance.

Al.
First, each business class (called J around here) should be 100K miles each, if available at the LOW category. That's often a rarity, so get prepared to be flexible, disappointed, or both.

Second, Pay With Miles is a completely different beast than using miles for an award ticket. Sometimes it's a good deal to do so, often times it isn't. I've never seen a PWM scenario in J to Paris where PWM made sense.

As for pointers, call Delta to see if there is any award availability as sometimes inventory doesn't appear on the website. Another pointer is that you don't have enough miles for 2 tickets in J to Paris - that would require 5K more miles, if you can find LOW...

Good luck and welcome to FT!
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