SkyMilesInsider Update: The Award calendar and other delta.com stuff...
Mar 5, 2010, 11:33 am
#76
Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: HNL
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AND, keep in mind that call volumes would go way, way down, as customers would be empowered to self service again (for things such as flight changes, that on delta.com rarely if ever are allowed and when so then usually still don't work). So yes, some initial hurdles, but so coincided with lower call volumes so easier to handle... and of course the savings in $$ wages to DL by needing far less phone reservations agents.
And also I am sure that PARS could be adpoted as a reservations tool while DeltaMatic kept for the rest (isn't DeltaMatic based on PARS and just a somewhat customized (downgraded, old outdated version) PARS made for Delta?). I am sure that each of these two systems has an API, so they could be made to talk to each other. So is done in business every single day: making different systems "talk" to each other.
So nwa.com could have been kept (superior UI, information quantity and quality online, online self-service tools) and PARS for reservations, while keep DeltaMatic (though should really upgrade it!) for other things.
And isn't it DeltaMatic that has far less features and limitations, e.g. I remember seeing here before that FAs could not select their jump seats in DeltaMatic (but could in PARS) and other such reports from Delta insiders. And isn't DeltaMatic just a somewhat customized older (way, way old and much outdated) PARS? So really NW PARS is an upgrade to DeltaMatic (older version of less-featured PARS).
Last edited by RealHJ; Mar 5, 2010 at 11:41 am
Mar 5, 2010, 11:41 am
#77
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And, it does NOT say nothing! DL actually admits that the award calendar is a problem! That is a big step! Just because it does not say anything that we didn't already know does not mean that the message does not contain new information!
Mar 5, 2010, 11:49 am
#78
Join Date: Jan 2009
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+1
While Pars would not have done all, there was no reason not to continue PARS and let that be the end seen by the end users (us) while the heavy lifting is being done by DLmatic behind the scenes.
e.g., Google serach does the work, but 4 front ends (IE, Chrome, Sfarai,
Firefox etc ) serve as the front ends for the info behind.
After all, before the merger, NW was able to see the seats on DL.com and price it better. Why not continue that end?
But before you go all misty eyed on NW, remember NW exces cashed out, NW IT is running the integration, NW is in it all the way. Would you let a bankrupt company buy a company with 1B $ cash? In the US we do!
While Pars would not have done all, there was no reason not to continue PARS and let that be the end seen by the end users (us) while the heavy lifting is being done by DLmatic behind the scenes.
e.g., Google serach does the work, but 4 front ends (IE, Chrome, Sfarai,
Firefox etc ) serve as the front ends for the info behind.
After all, before the merger, NW was able to see the seats on DL.com and price it better. Why not continue that end?
But before you go all misty eyed on NW, remember NW exces cashed out, NW IT is running the integration, NW is in it all the way. Would you let a bankrupt company buy a company with 1B $ cash? In the US we do!
Mar 5, 2010, 11:54 am
#79
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Posts: 22,778
As we integrated our reservations systems, lots of people were watching with anticipation to see what the combined website, delta.com, would offer. This continues to be a work in progress.
For many months, our technology teams were focused on combining two web sites and reservations platforms into one, single system. Our first priority was to make this integration happen smoothly for all of our customers. Web site integration is no small task, and we needed every person focused to get the job done. On January 31st, we turned the switch and made the change to one system, one site.
With the integration we were able to bring along some key functionality that has proven to be particularly important this snow-heavy winter. Delta.com now offers the ability to make changes to your travel schedule. So when Delta issues a weather advisory to notify customers that we’ve waived change fees due to inclement weather, you can make any changes needed right on delta.com.
That brings us to where we are today. With the most intense part of the switch completed, we’re now working on items that are next on the list – including Award calendar. We have been monitoring your past responses and continue to making sure that your concerns are considered in our plans for moving forward.
As we move down this path, we can’t overstate the importance of Delta people in the process as crucial contributors to the evolution of our technology. And we’re fortunate to now add to the Delta team the talents of those who worked on nwa.com, bolstering a robust team of programmers and project leaders working on improvements to delta.com for the future.
So the burning question you must all have is, ‘when will the new Award calendar be live?’ Our response: As soon as possible. These things take time, but we are in the process of making improvements to award calendar which you will see on delta.com by summer and we will continue to add improvements throughout the year. We hear you and we are taking action!
We have many dot com people that watch FlyerTalk already and your feedback is important to us. We are absolutely in tune with your suggestions and travel needs from department heads down to individual programmers. Our goal is continue to build delta.com into an easy to use, online source for easily communicating and doing business with Delta.
When we are ready to launch, you will be among the very first to know.
SkyMilesInsider
For many months, our technology teams were focused on combining two web sites and reservations platforms into one, single system. Our first priority was to make this integration happen smoothly for all of our customers. Web site integration is no small task, and we needed every person focused to get the job done. On January 31st, we turned the switch and made the change to one system, one site.
With the integration we were able to bring along some key functionality that has proven to be particularly important this snow-heavy winter. Delta.com now offers the ability to make changes to your travel schedule. So when Delta issues a weather advisory to notify customers that we’ve waived change fees due to inclement weather, you can make any changes needed right on delta.com.
That brings us to where we are today. With the most intense part of the switch completed, we’re now working on items that are next on the list – including Award calendar. We have been monitoring your past responses and continue to making sure that your concerns are considered in our plans for moving forward.
As we move down this path, we can’t overstate the importance of Delta people in the process as crucial contributors to the evolution of our technology. And we’re fortunate to now add to the Delta team the talents of those who worked on nwa.com, bolstering a robust team of programmers and project leaders working on improvements to delta.com for the future.
So the burning question you must all have is, ‘when will the new Award calendar be live?’ Our response: As soon as possible. These things take time, but we are in the process of making improvements to award calendar which you will see on delta.com by summer and we will continue to add improvements throughout the year. We hear you and we are taking action!
We have many dot com people that watch FlyerTalk already and your feedback is important to us. We are absolutely in tune with your suggestions and travel needs from department heads down to individual programmers. Our goal is continue to build delta.com into an easy to use, online source for easily communicating and doing business with Delta.
When we are ready to launch, you will be among the very first to know.
SkyMilesInsider
I doubt anyone here thinks that integrating websites is an easy task. Stating that it's not an easy task sounds like an excuse. All my trips this year, international, as well as, domestic have had issues with check-in. On my last trip, I was unable to check in for all my return flights at all. I left my returning point with only one BP. Every time, I am told, "these are problems arising due to integration". In January, I was told that they will go away on February 1st. Now it's March and the problems have not gone away yet. How long does delta plans to recycle this excuse! It's very clear Delta did not plan, nor execute the merger with due consideration to convenience to its passengers. I am shocked.
Mar 5, 2010, 11:58 am
#80
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Posts: 8,144
I just tried booking an award ticket from the NYC area to HKG for the month of June default info is as follows: June 12 to June 24 in BE). First: Cont.com displays a green square on its reward calendar meaning there should be saverpass business seats available, but guess what? when you look down the chart, amazingly there is no availability in business. You're only choice is coach via the reward calendar. On the return leg on CO.com you can get a 3 leg journey for 62,500 miles at just under 22 hours of flight time in BF.
Delta award calendar has this available for 300,000 miles with business available on both the outbound and inbound.
Summary: Continental will cost you 95K miles and $64.00 with coach on the inbound and BF on the outbound.
Delta will cost you 300K miles and $55.00 with BE available on all legs.
Note: There are plenty of dates on the CO calendar where BF isnt even an option, and where it is, the RT mileage redemption is 300K at $34.00
I also noticed that just as with the DL award calendar, there were a lot of CO dates that displayed 'green', meaning that saverpass BF seats should have been available, but weren't.
I'm not suggesting that DL awards are better then CO, but CO has its share of headaches to.
Edited to add: DL award availability to HKG from the NYC market in BE can be found for as low as 240K miles. Clearly not as good as CO but I've found that at least DL does give you the option to get there in BE if you want to spend the miles. Also, I do believe its preposterous that there is absolutely no low mileage opportunities in BE for travel to HKG for as long as the award calendar will allow you to check. This is something that is hopefully fixed.
Last edited by DL2SXM; Mar 5, 2010 at 12:07 pm
Mar 5, 2010, 12:06 pm
#81
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Posts: 3,386
Dont take it so personal.
I just tried booking an award ticket from the NYC area to HKG for the month of June default info is as follows: June 12 to June 24 in BE). First: Cont.com displays a green square on its reward calendar meaning there should be saverpass business seats available, but guess what? when you look down the chart, amazingly there is no availability in business. You're only choice is coach via the reward calendar. On the return leg on CO.com you can get a 3 leg journey for 62,500 miles at just under 22 hours of flight time in BF.
Delta award calendar has this available for 300,000 miles with business available on both the outbound and inbound.
Summary: Continental will cost you 95K miles and $64.00 with coach on the inbound and BF on the outbound.
Delta will cost you 300K miles and $55.00 with BE available on all legs.
Note: There are plenty of dates on the CO calendar where BF isnt even an option, and where it is, the RT mileage redemption is 300K at $34.00
I also noticed that just as with the DL award calendar, there were a lot of CO dates that displayed 'green', meaning that saverpass BF seats should have been available, but weren't.
I'm not suggesting that DL awards are better then CO, but CO has its share of headaches to.
I just tried booking an award ticket from the NYC area to HKG for the month of June default info is as follows: June 12 to June 24 in BE). First: Cont.com displays a green square on its reward calendar meaning there should be saverpass business seats available, but guess what? when you look down the chart, amazingly there is no availability in business. You're only choice is coach via the reward calendar. On the return leg on CO.com you can get a 3 leg journey for 62,500 miles at just under 22 hours of flight time in BF.
Delta award calendar has this available for 300,000 miles with business available on both the outbound and inbound.
Summary: Continental will cost you 95K miles and $64.00 with coach on the inbound and BF on the outbound.
Delta will cost you 300K miles and $55.00 with BE available on all legs.
Note: There are plenty of dates on the CO calendar where BF isnt even an option, and where it is, the RT mileage redemption is 300K at $34.00
I also noticed that just as with the DL award calendar, there were a lot of CO dates that displayed 'green', meaning that saverpass BF seats should have been available, but weren't.
I'm not suggesting that DL awards are better then CO, but CO has its share of headaches to.
You will note that the preponderance of these "saver-awards-not-found" events is much worse on DL.COM than on CO.COM. It's almost universal on DL.COM.
I agree that CO isn't perfect either, but it tries in good faith to give efficient options, and it makes enough of them available and actually bookable that we don't need to call into question the purpose of the management team.
In other businesses, let's say, iPod vendors, would a retailer that sold them for 200% more than the competition remain in business long?
Mar 5, 2010, 12:07 pm
#82
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: DEN
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Not exactly a strong argument here... An extra 205k miles for one way of BE?? Are you kidding me?
Mar 5, 2010, 12:09 pm
#83
Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: West Michigan
Programs: DL, UA, AA, B6, BA (airline status-free leisure traveler), Hilton Diamond
Posts: 1,963
Refund miles?
So, does that mean when DL finally fixes the award calendar they will reimburse me some of my miles back from the rip-off 65K per ticket that I spent for two US to Hawaii tickets recently?
Mar 5, 2010, 12:09 pm
#84
Join Date: Jun 2005
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To guide our friends in DL's IT group, some "must haves" of any fix of the award booking system...
Two or three years ago the award calendar did work on delta.com. It was the old style calendar where the dates were all in a row and availability was indicated by a bold dot on a date. Not sure what happened since then to make it so screwed up.
And it goes without saying that the best tool in the world is worth nothing without reasonable inventory and consistent pricing. Good luck. Looking forward to a "summer" rollout.
- Let you see F/J and Y availability simultaneously. Sometimes only a "high" coach award is available, but you can get a low or medium front cabin award for similar miles. This is mainly true for domestic awards.
- Don't say a low F/J award is available when it's really only available on one segment. You may make an exception if a short domestic segment on an international award is only available in Y. But in that case, make it easy to switch to the front cabin if/when that award seat opens up.
- If the award calendar says there are low awards, make sure that there are really low awards when you drill down to a specific date.
- Make the award bucket inventory (O and R) available on ExpertFlyer. If we could see it via a tool like that a lot of the mystery goes away. NW did it, and DL could do that NOW.
Two or three years ago the award calendar did work on delta.com. It was the old style calendar where the dates were all in a row and availability was indicated by a bold dot on a date. Not sure what happened since then to make it so screwed up.
And it goes without saying that the best tool in the world is worth nothing without reasonable inventory and consistent pricing. Good luck. Looking forward to a "summer" rollout.
Mar 5, 2010, 12:15 pm
#85
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Posts: 8,144
Listen, I am sure that most of us on here are reasonable in understanding that DL can not offer low tier availability on every single day of the month in BE for TPAC travel. But, as I edited in my last post, it is totally unconscionable that for as long as the DL award calendar will allow you to book award travel, absolutely NO low tier seats in BE are available.
Just this past December, I unwillingly redeemed nearly 740K miles for two BE award tickets from JFK to SYD before I found cheaper mileage availability on nwa.com. NWA.com offered me the chance to fly the domestic segments in coach and the tpac in business, for a savings of over 240K miles.
Mar 5, 2010, 12:23 pm
#86
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Mar 5, 2010, 12:27 pm
#87
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To SMI - Thanks for the update, and the clear presentation that DL understands there are issues with the award calendar.
To 97% of the rest of the posters: Thanks for the laughs - I needed some totally over-the-top entertainment, as a break from working in (non-airline but huge) enterprise system design/development.
I especially liked (and no I'm not bothering to exactly quote):
Fully expecting the usual suspects to respond with sheep, koolaid, and "loyalist". Despite my often making it clear that I agree the award calendar blows, I liked nwa.com better than delta.com, DL's miles are of lower value than all their legacy competitors, as are their FF plan policies.
That's why any DL I fly for price/convenience now gets credited to AS, and why CO is now my primary program for *A travel.
But get a grip folks. There's been years of moaning about bad communication from DL pre-merger and post - SMI is now giving us the "scoop" again, and you're giving back a beat-down.
SMI doesn't run DL IT. SMI doesn't run DAL itself. SMI can't decide what the systems integration and development priorities are. SMI can't disclose proprietary, inside, or tentative information, nor anything that might be "Delta Confidential Information". Which typically is what all large companies extend to cover software specs, software product rollouts, prioritization, funding, and scheduling of IT projects.
Considering how many people on this board claim to be "up in the air" due to IT-related consultant work, I have to think that many folk's concept of "IT" is making a nice website with a MySQL backend for a 3-location flower shop, with non-realtime messaging from FTD as the biggest integration challenge.
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
Delta.com is worse than united.com, usairways.com, aa.com, and continental.com. Way worse than nwa.com. SO WHAT? They made a decision to integrate the airline on the only platform that they could do so in short order, knowing that functionality would be lost. But they could fly on the single certificate, eliminate the problems of dual PNR and operations systems, etc.
Now, with the influence of the good NW folks who knew nwa.com and its back ends were better finally on the rise, you're beating up on SMI and DL?? What does it take to satisfy you guys?
To 97% of the rest of the posters: Thanks for the laughs - I needed some totally over-the-top entertainment, as a break from working in (non-airline but huge) enterprise system design/development.
I especially liked (and no I'm not bothering to exactly quote):
- It could have been fixed in 24 hours.
- The clueless confusion continues between "website" and "enterprise system".
- The continually ignorance about how much bigger PMDL was than PMNW, never mind NeWDelta. Ever think about performance testing, scalability, transaction volume, yadda yadda? Maybe NW's systems (no NOT the "website" - the actual systems doing the work of running the airline) didn't scale?
- Finally, the "shoot the messenger" stuff.
Fully expecting the usual suspects to respond with sheep, koolaid, and "loyalist". Despite my often making it clear that I agree the award calendar blows, I liked nwa.com better than delta.com, DL's miles are of lower value than all their legacy competitors, as are their FF plan policies.
That's why any DL I fly for price/convenience now gets credited to AS, and why CO is now my primary program for *A travel.
But get a grip folks. There's been years of moaning about bad communication from DL pre-merger and post - SMI is now giving us the "scoop" again, and you're giving back a beat-down.
SMI doesn't run DL IT. SMI doesn't run DAL itself. SMI can't decide what the systems integration and development priorities are. SMI can't disclose proprietary, inside, or tentative information, nor anything that might be "Delta Confidential Information". Which typically is what all large companies extend to cover software specs, software product rollouts, prioritization, funding, and scheduling of IT projects.
Considering how many people on this board claim to be "up in the air" due to IT-related consultant work, I have to think that many folk's concept of "IT" is making a nice website with a MySQL backend for a 3-location flower shop, with non-realtime messaging from FTD as the biggest integration challenge.
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
Delta.com is worse than united.com, usairways.com, aa.com, and continental.com. Way worse than nwa.com. SO WHAT? They made a decision to integrate the airline on the only platform that they could do so in short order, knowing that functionality would be lost. But they could fly on the single certificate, eliminate the problems of dual PNR and operations systems, etc.
Now, with the influence of the good NW folks who knew nwa.com and its back ends were better finally on the rise, you're beating up on SMI and DL?? What does it take to satisfy you guys?
Mar 5, 2010, 12:31 pm
#89
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Mar 5, 2010, 12:48 pm
#90
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