Originally Posted by
whooperatw
I fear this text from the terms would be construed to fit the current actions - how it would hold up in court would be interesting.
"11. Flight Irregularities: In the event of flight cancellation or itinerary change, previously confirmed upgrades are subject to cancellation.
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In reality the average user would view the cert as purchasing and therefore confirming a business seat and should be protected as such (myself included). If Delta makes a change which punishes us - pushing schedules out of our desired window or downgrading aircraft in which the purchased class is not available (CRJ700 to CRJ200 for example), they should be obligated to rebook. Now if the system rebooks legal connections they could argue they have and any further changes are voluntary. Not customer friendly but possibly technically right.
In the end, past process was to be able to move around on schedule changes with almost no limitations. Now Delta seems to be saying any request to change from the booked itinerary or rebooked one by them is a voluntary change and thus upgrades no longer valid. Good way to anger loyal customers but probably useful in long term consumer behavior. As mentioned above, perhaps these are more useful as Super-RUC now. Only way to get improvement is for the bottom line to be affected, but without business travel returning full bore for sometime, probably a very limited subset of us using these in the way they have been with the pool shrinking and new users going how nice I can spend 800 dollars for MC and have a nice PS seat for nothing extra.
From posts that others have made on the topic (including some from me), they do seem to be citing "rule 11" now when these situations come up. I just have a hard time with them calling a schedule change 4 months out a "flight irregularity." A flight cancelled due to weather or mechanical on day of travel, yes, that's an irregularity. If you were to buy a flight and there is a schedule change of 90+ minutes, you can change to any other itinerary, but yet they restrict this rule with UCs.
I think the other thing that makes these no-change-allowed policies difficult to swallow is looking at your itinerary and seeing the word CONFIMRED on your premium seat itinerary. "Yes, you have this seat!" (Most) any other time that Delta makes a schedule change and downgrades you, you are due downgrade compensation, but they treat these differently (I guess that's where the OY/OK/OV comes in instead of them booking us into A/J/F/etc). And its not like these certs are "free;" you have to be in their most loyal tier to earn them, so this policy is only affecting their most loyal customers, which is a weird move. Yes, I know that loyalty is only a one-way street, that has been discussed before but still...