GUIDE SECTION
1. General info on partner bookings
Booking on partners is one of the finest ways to use SM, but can also be one of the most frustrating due to the limited tools DL offers its fliers. But by reading through this guide hopefully you will find booking awards much easier.
• With the changes to the 2015 program, awards with partners no longer are constrained to the lowest award level (sadly). Tto know how many miles your partner booking will cost you it is best to refer to the published
DL award mileage charts.
• Remember the proverbial
search for one way advice. This is particularly helpful in piecing together complex itineraries and the way to go.
• Just like domestic awards on DL metal, you may place
holds on award tickets with partners as well. Often DL will hold these reservations longer than 42 hours (some reports of up to a week), but note that DL does not promise a longer hold than 24 hours and there is a small chance the partner airline might drop the availability (in which case DL would likely just say sorry). Some DL agents won't do holds, so just call back.
• For more general information on SM awards, refer to
DL's SM award rules.
2. How to search for partner awards
Searching for partner awards can be a major pain. Stories of DL flyers searching hours on various websites and spending equally as long on the phone with DL agents is far too common. But a few tricks shared here might save you a significant amount of time. Keep in mind partner awards must be on partner metal, they cannot be codeshare flights operated by carriers that DL has no SM partnership with (eg AS or HA).
• First,
avoid DL.com. Seriously. Ever since DL got rid of NWA.com, DL.com has been a step backwards in the loss of not being able to search for many partners (
as of Jan 2015 you can find DL, AF, KL, AZ, VA, AS, KE, and AM and HA [inter-island] inventory on DL.com) and a bigger issue of the broken DL award calendar.
In March 2015, DL confirmed that you can book CZ, MU, CI, G3, GA, AR, SU, & VN online (but with limited routes). YMMV. This has been documented
time and
time again here on FT. Just search for
broken award calendar. DL knows it's broke and clearly refuses to fix it. However, in some instances (eg DL metal or on KE) it may just be unavoidable, so tricks in this thread (best trick is to search OW segment by segment to piece together) are quite useful:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...ss-awards.html
DL seems to be as of Jan 2015 putting new abilities to book partners on DL.com, but it remains spotty.
Here are some recent reports:
Mar 15: DL confirms that CZ, MU, CI, and G3 are bookable online. DL
later in March reported GA, AR, SU, & VN are bookable online, but not all routes. They lastly report issues with VA which they are trying to fix. Overall, YMMV
Jan 2015: CZ, MU, and VN are bookable but have been having issues. KE has been spotty since Sep 2014 but seems to be better in Jan 2015
Oct 2014: AS and VA were removed from DL.com, but put back and now seem to be available (Jan 2015)
Sept 2014: KE became spotty around this time, and has often been seen on DL.com but remains spotty (Jan 2015)
• The best alternative is thus to utilize
partner websites. See the partner information
post below for airline specific tips, but in general
airfrance.us (finding
AF/KL/AZ/DL/CI/CZ availability),
klm.com (same as airfrance.us), and
alaskaair.com (for AS and DL availability) are your best bets. Please note that the KVS Tool Award Class codes for
DL/AF/KL/AZ/OK/RO/CZ/VN/KQ/AM/UX/ME are CS for Business Awards & YS for Economy Awards. Also, airfrance.us and klm.com only can search out to 300 days.
• Award inventory search tools are your friend as well.
Expert Flyer,
KVS, and the free
Wandering Aramean tools are the go-to's. With these tools you can search the specific fare class availability that needs to exist in order to book your award. Recently (2013) I have found
Awardtravelr to work well with CZ, KE, and CI.
•
As of mid-2012, there has been increasing issues with AF (and sometimes KL) availability. Often AF.com shows "classic" availability but DL cannot access that inventory. It appears that AF has created a faux "classic" award that is only available to FB members and not to ST partners. More info will be posted on this as it is available, but try finding the lower priced classic award (eg intra-EU true ST partner classic is 30K whereas FB faux "classic" is 40K). See this
thread for more info. The best bet for now is to use EF to search for O/X availability.
• Lastly calling works, and you have to book it this way anyways since likely you can't book it on DL.com. So call. Higher elite agents are most helpful (if you get the Chisholm agents you're in luck!). There has been varied success in people calling DL SIN or DL HKG in that agents there can see different availability. Keep in mind many DL agents will simply do a search in Deltamatic and not find partner flights. If they tell you it doesn't exists politely inform them of the timing and routing. If you still have no luck hang up and speak to someone else. Some DL agents refuse to do point to point searches (due to the fact they don't want misconnects), but it can be found if you've done your homework. Many times elite agents will transfer you to the
ST international desk or
manual pricing desk or more recently
IMR (international manual reissue) - these agents are often experts at booking complex partner itineraries.
More links:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...ve-thread.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...ml#post2804833
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/flyin...ool-af-kl.html
3. Valid routings and segment rules
As of 2015, DL has removed the ability to have stop-overs (SO) on award tickets, one of the previously most valuable aspects of award tickets. You can book open jaw (OJ) tickets which will be priced based upon one way pricing. While
DL's website lists SO
or OJ, as stated above SO's are no longer allowed. Keep in mind, since many partner awards consist of international itineraries, international stop-overs are considered stops for over 24 hours. Thus you can layover in a city for up to 24 hours without it counting as a stop-over.
Other than RTW tickets (see links below in section 7), keep in mind that the Delta enforces a MPS and MPM (max permitted segments and miles) rules of 8 segments (4 each direction), and MPM is a function of your routing (refer to EF/KVS as only DL manual pricing desk agents know the MPM). Keep in mind that
you are allowed to exceed the MPM if the carrier you're flying publishes a fare routed that way. This is one area where sometimes DL.com prices correctly and over the phone does not. So the solution here is to self-redeem (ask agent to put you on hold, then redeem yourself online). Lastly, it is perfectly acceptable to mix carriers/metal to form different routings (including ST and non-ST). For instance, if you wanted to fly from TPE-PVG, you don't have to fly direct on CI. So long as availability exists, you could fly TPE-KE-ICN-MU-PVG and it should not be considered two segments (thus doubling the miles).
Lastly, keep in mind there are NO married segments in award tickets for partners (DL metal only itins may have married segments).
4. Inventory issues & fees
• One of the most frustrating issues with booking partner awards is if you find the proper award class availability (via one of the tools above) and give DL a call,
DL agents cannot find the availability. There are many causes of this (DL IT, communication issues between DL and partners, potential errors in tool lookups, etc) but your best bet is to either call back later (sometimes overnight systems sync regarding what DL can access) or request a long or manual sell. This is due to the fact that their generic search for seats via Deltamatic (I believe they used Direct Access for this search) won't return anything, but sometimes inventory might actually exist.
• A
manual or long sell is a manual request for award seat availability that DL agents can request of a partner airline. This is something that is done via Deltamatic/GDS and is a manual entry (hence manual sell). DL agents literally will request a seat on a specific flight (they enter in flight details) for a specific fare class. While many DL agents will outright refuse to do this, insisting their search done on Deltamatic is accurate, requesting (kindly) for this will often yield success (i.e. you will be able to get an award seat when the original search done on Deltamatic indicated no seats available). The airlines that doing long sells is known to work for with DL are: CZ, CI, MU, and MH. Manual sells will not yield different results with AS, AF, KL, KE, AZ, and AZ. When a long sell is successful, the agent will receive back an "HK" code which in Amadeus speak means "holding confirmed" (i.e. the seat is confirmed). If you succeed in getting this to work, it is advisable to book the award and not just place it on hold. In some rare instances if the agents cannot pull the flights via schedule but can find it point to point, you may have to request them to do long sells on carriers that don't normally require it (KE), at this point you'll likely need to be with a Skyteam desk agent. If unconfirmed agent will get "UC" code, and in rare instances DL's system returns long sell denied (I don't quite know what this means yet).
•
Incorrect pricing often occurs with partners, another extremely frustrating experience when booking on partners. Most DL agents will simply shrug and tell you it is what it is or that they can only do what the computer tells them, but if you find an agent willing to work with you, the outcome is often good. For example, if I wanted to fly ATL-AF-CDG-AZ-FCO-KL-AMS-KL-ATL in J it should be 100K. But often you'll get back something like 150K or higher (indicating 3 legs, not 2). What is happening is the DL award pricing engine is counting double segments somewhere (i.e. ATL-AF-CDG and CDG-AZ-FCO may be priced as two separate segments in J) or doing "point to point" pricing. Ask the agent how it is pricing out and trouble shoot from there. Patience and coaching the DL agents are your friends here.
Here are a few other tips:
- Ensure the agent is coding the flights correctly, it might be a
code-share issue
- Have the agent check to ensure it is not a
married segment issue
- If "point to point" ticketing is occurring, you can ask to see if searching from origin to destination (without manually forcing your routing or connections) can bring it down. Ask the agent to decode the pricing for you (what segments are costing what). A good agent can do this for you, but often an lazy or untrained agent cannot. One fool-proof (but a bit burdensome) trick is that if you're a PM/DM, you can have the ticket issued and then decode it yourself. A great discussion on this runs from posts
1359-
1405 in the "How to Search for Low Tier Business Awards"
sticky.
- Some agents may claim that your routing is not a "
valid routing" given your origination and destination. This is likely to happen if you fly a single carrier (i.e. ATL-AF-CDG-AF-FCO) but have the agent continue to work with the reservation. Not being a
valid routing is something that should not be an issue. However, if you do have stopovers often you must make them along legal routings. Hence hubs are your friend.
- If all else fails, do not give up. Kindly request to have someone at the
international manual reissue or ST desk look into it. I've had a very complicated 3 country 3 carrier J ticket originally reprice at 3 times the level it was, after an hour with the manual repricing desk they magically "fixed" it.
- Unfortunately there is no secret sometimes to this issue, so in the end remember the FT mantra of "
call call call".
• DL of course will levy a
$25 booking fee (waiver GM or higher) for booking over the phone, which is a joke since most partners cannot be booked online. A simple trick to this is to have an agent put the PNR together, place it on hold, and go online yourself to redeem it.
• DL the past few years has been increasing two sneaky and notorious fees often blurred as a tax. First is the carrier-imposed
YQ or YR surcharge, which is often labelled as a fuel surcharge. The amount is generally based on the amount of YQ/YR that the operating carrier would charge on a revenue ticket in the given class of service when the ticket is sold with a US origin. DL collects the YQ/YR surcharge on many of its partners at this point. However, DL, AF, KL, and AZ metal will not result in YQ/YR collection except if you originate in Europe. This is often referred to as the
international origination surcharge (IOS).
It does not apply for tickets originating outside of Europe on DL metal. In addition to Europe, tickets originating in the Middle East and involving travel on AF or KL (and maybe AZ) will invoke the IOS. Note that the IOS is simply just a rebranding of the YQ/YR surcharge. It will be coded on your ticket receipt as YQ and/or YR. The best way to estimate your fees/taxes is to build a paid ticket with your itinerary on
ITA and check the fare breakdown.
5. Blackout dates
Blackout dates can be a major pain, so ensure that you know these up front. Blackout dates only exist for a certain number of airlines (KE, CI, MU, AE, and recently CZ) but can severely restrict your ability to use your miles. What's interesting is that the partners that instill these blackout dates actually have certain conditions to these dates (see
third link below), i.e. blackouts will only affect certain flights (international, domestic, certain routings etc). But DL in all their brilliance applies a universal blackout meaning all flights on that carrier are blacked out. In other words, DL's blackout dates are more restrictive than the original partner carriers that impose them. Since DL buries these into its system and routing rules, forget trying to argue with DL and make it work. Just avoid the dates.
As of
March 2015, it appears only CI and CZ blackout dates are applying, and previously reported KE dates are no longer an issue with booking DL SM tickets on KE. YMMV, so please report your experience.
Here are the CZ 2015 Blackout dates.
Thanks to the FT-ers (esp
RealHJ) who have compiled these.
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...ll-2012-a.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...ae-2013-a.html
2014 Blackout dates here
Award Guru blackout dates
2015 KE blackout dates
Booking Award tickets from 2015 On Thread
6. Mileage UG's on partners
• Mileage UG's may only be done on ST partner airlines if full Y (or various other full) fares are purchased. Upgrades must be processed 72 hours in advance.
See DL's upgrade page or the
ST upgrade page for more information.
• The only two exceptions to this rule is with AF/KLM. On KLM you may UG to O (J class) with a Y, B, M, or U fare. And with AF you can upgrade to O class with a purchase of an S or W (premium economy) fare.
However, currently there is some information indicating that AF upgrades are about to end. Please see thread links below for more on this topic. AF upgrades are not permitted on the 747 and both AF/KL upgrades are for TATL flights only (varied success from folks on intra-EU flights).
• Lastly, keep in mind that mileage UG's must be processed 72 or more hours in advance, thus do not apply for airport waitlist standby upgrades (which apply to SWU's only).
For more upgrade information, see links below (first link is a
master thread kudos to
rwoman)
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...-skymiles.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...rance-klm.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...premium-w.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...-see-them.html
7. Other important SM booking links
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...ss-awards.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...ve-thread.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...eem-exist.html
8. Other misc links
Milepoint Definitive Guide to booking SM
Boarding Area DL & Partner Award Classes
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...am-awards.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...ve-thread.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...l-j-2-pax.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...cket-asia.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...ve-thread.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...ve-thread.html