RealHJ

Except that 99% of agents at the rate desk just will tell you that the computer is always right, and won't bother to do their job and actually fix it for you. So, you may need to spend many hours, possibly 10s of hours, calling back until you get an agent who cares and understands the fare rules and thus will correct it for you.

andrew10412

i am having trouble with a stopover/open jaw ticket being priced out correctly. i have heard all of the excuses from delta agents that others have reported in this thread.

can someone tell me if i am correct in thinking the following is legal?:

DEN-JFK-MAD openjaw

OVD-CDG stopover CDG-AMS-MSP-DEN

i was able to get this all at 100k low level business except the CDG-AMS portion which was in coach. availability has opened up in biz, and both agents say that they would need 25,000 more miles to reissue the ticket....
i explained it makes no sense as all partner award is at low level, and if it wasn't legal it wouldn't have been ticketed in the first place.

they went on to cite all kinds of 'fare/routing rules' blah blah blah.

are more miles needed to put that segment in biz?

PS - i can't wait to drop to Platinum in March so that my calls are routed to Chisolm... the Diamond agents are a joke.

andrew10412

i know!! depending on how you look at it, it is either brilliant or dreadful.

as a passenger it drives me crazy, Delta pricing mileage tickets like revenue tickets (change in fare (addt'l miles), change fees for FO/GM, etc)

however, for them it is all additional revenue.

coiaflyer

Seems like it should work. I would keep calling and try speaking to a supervisor and explain that you took a voluntary downgrade and now the class or service you are ticketed in has opened up. Your issue is quite straight forward so hopefully someone will take care of it for you. However in the big scheme of things the CDG-AMS portion is one flight where you won't notice much of a difference in business versus economy.

mnredfox

What happened to the days when agents would go out of their way to find out what was wrong and then try to help you fix it?

On this specific issue, I honestly hate calling DL now to book awards that involve partners, OJ, or SO's. The agents (I'm even talking DM agents here) seem so clueless about the rules, and even with the rules known they simply refuse to take initiative to solve the issue - instead popping excuse after excuse?

Booking award service has seemed to go downhill since the merger, maybe it was because:

1. Loss of elite calls going to Chisholm
2. Ridiculous 3 search limit DL tried to implement
3. Complete lack of training for agents on booking partner awards
4. Complete lack of IT to allow flyers to book partner awards on DL.com with exception to a few (i.e. AF/KL).

RealHJ

As per DL, now you can have EITHER open jaw OR stopover, but not both. Here you have an open jaw and a stopover. That used to be fine, but NOW IS NO LONGER ALLOWED.

altairkh

But even one stopover is NOT allowed now.

javabytes

From the published fare rules on every award itinerary I can bring up:

MSPeconomist

My understanding is that SMI has his FT PM account set up only to accept messages from people on an approved list consisting of those who he has met personally. Has this changed? Or could the inbox be full?

altairkh

Any update about this issue? I have just checked at .dumb but it still says I need 50k for low domestic award with one stopover. It has been already several days.

RealHJ

Except that DL is not going to honor this, and you are going to get a lot of excuses (most of them totally illogical). DL has a long and "proud" history of not honoring their own written word.

javabytes

The published fare rules are the published fare rules. Period. Full stop. The end. It's a very simple conversation:

Cust: I'd like to book an award ticket XXX-YYY with a stopover in ZZZ on the outbound. I see that all segments are available in "Low".
Agent: Okay, that will be 50,000 miles please.
Cust: No, this should price at 25,000 miles.
Agent: I'm sorry, but that is what the computer says.
Cust: Please look in the fare rules and read to me what it says under "Stopovers".
Agent: "1 STOPOVER PERMITTED EITHER OUTBOUND OR INBOUND. NOTE - TO QUALIFY THE STOPOVER CITY MUST BE ON A VALID PUBLISHED FARE ROUTING"
Cust: Then why aren't I being allowed a stopover?

Any agent with two brain cells to rub together will recognize the issue here.

Potential fork of the continuing conversation:
Agent: You are allowed a stopover... you just have to pay for it.
Cust: "Permitted" means it's permitted (read: included) on this fare, not that it breaks the fare and I have to pay double.

Josephmay

I really hope that the reason Delta is no longer pricing correctly Stopovers and Open Jaws on award tickets because of a IT hiccup and not a Policy change....

This is deeply disturbing devaluation -- Allowing one SO and one OJ on award tickets are the great equalizer that makes SkyMiles worth something to me. Even though I am a lowly GM and have indeed greatly benefited from domestic medallion upgrades, this could be the deal breaker. I fly Delta so I can do aspirational leisure travel. I have been doing all I can to earn skymiles- Skymiles AMEX, Delta Skymiles Dining, Skymiles shopping portal etc.. What is the point of earning SMs in small chunks if they devalue them in large chunks.
Utimately, this change/devaluation would greatly decrease the value of Skymiles to me and cause me to seriously evaluate other options.

dll

I know. Their silence is deafening.

RealHJ

Agent (after putting you on hold for 15 minutes): I was told by the rate desk that neither they nor ANYONE at Delta can change the pricing. The pricing is how it comes out. I was told that comparing the fare rules to the actual fare is like apples and oranges and that this was a big waste of their time (that's a direct quote, by the way).

Agent: your destination already is the stopover.

Agent: you can not have a stopover on a routing that is not operated by Delta.

Agent: you can not have stopovers on tickets which include airlines other than Delta. This is a (emphasis) SkyMiles award ticket, after all.

Agent: you can have a stopover, but then you need to pay for a second round trip flight. It is pricing correctly.

Agent (on an obvious routing, such as xxx(NA)-NRT-xxx(Asia): that is not a valid Delta routing, that is why you need to pay for a second round trip if you want a stopover at NRT.
Customer: but that is the only possible routing on Delta
Agent: it is not valid.

These are all real world actual responses.