aviatorzz

I am sure there the F seats are truly open but if you are looking at international flights, especially to Asia, those flights tend to be full with a chunk of seats that may be in fact full and not assigned. The seat map isn't necessarily a definitive description nor accurate description of the actual availability.

That being said, be flexible on your dates, you will find something.

mother-

Firstly I never said anything even REMOTELY like that.

Second I'll bet you meant to say "I check a dozen or two dates and found one with lots of low awards."

So, to catch you up to what was written above you I have a low mileage award DTW-ICN-DTW but can't get to/from DTW at low from any of the nearby airports in any class without spending multiple nights in DTW.

So I've already done the supposedly hard bit, and I can't be that flexible on dates... ^

What this thread is about is Delta not seeming to offer ANY low awards on flights that are currently empty or near empty in the class of service being inquired about, and sometimes the other one too...

3Cforme

No, it isn't about that, and can't be: you don't have the information to know that zero Low awards have been booked thus far. Strictly put, your complaint is that you don't see Low awards when you look. Join the club - but the observation isn't noteworthy.

mother-

Can you go crap on someone elses thread? I'm not even sure how to respond to you. I'm pretty sure I'm the OP (quoted below for reference) and what I said in my OP is more or less what you're now telling me I didn't.

Or do you mean to be answering me with "Yes you are a victim of unassigned seats on nearly every flight you are considering"?

Not necessarily making any low seats available on a flight is entirely different from not making enough of them available.

ND76

I've been lucky enough to live near IAD; where I have been able to snag J class seats to western Europe on AF or KLM on very short notice. I can't plan very far ahead for a vacation as I am self-employed and may get a new gig on the spur of the moment. Being generally always able to book a quick long weekend trip in a premium class at the lowest mileage redemption rate the day before departure has been great for me; for the past several years, this is how I have spent my miles.

There was some kind of a falling out between Delta and AF/KLM (they are controlled by the same parent corporation) around March of this year, and AF/KLM has basically withdrawn most if not all of their free ticket inventory from use by DL frequent flyers. Between IAD and CDG, they offer at least 98 J seats per day (almost 130 when they fly the A380), and between IAD and AMS they offer 30 J seats per day. Many days, the J cabin is around 50% full. I noticed that this week appears to be a busy week for TATL travel involving IAD, as many of the flights have just a handful of seats left.

You could get a coach ticket between IAD and LHR, flying through DTW, for 60k SMs + about $200 taxes and fees. For that, I might as well pay the $846 for a round trip ticket and pick-up around 17,000 SMs and over 8,500 MQMs.

I think I can still use my miles on Aeroflot and Korean Air, although I have never tried. Aeroflot serves DEL via SVO (I want to visit the Taj Mahal, and one can take the train to Agra from Delhi); and Korean Air serves pretty much all of east Asia as well as Australia and New Zealand. Both airlines serve IAD.

There is nothing available out of IAD to western Europe (and back) for 100,000 SMs this weekend. The thought of spending 350k SMs for one J ticket is not appealing to me. I'd rather hold onto them and wait for a better day.

AeroWesty

I understand your plight.

When I was looking for a Low award to Europe last summer for fall travel, I would find either Medium or High on the nonstops from PDX to/from Europe, or was finding that it cost another 80K for the domestic connections to/from the international gateways where Low seats were available. This was while continental.com was showing open Saver seats on Star Alliance flights for any day I picked, looking ahead two months.

It seems like if you're planning in advance, outside of either pure luck, being very flexible on dates, or willing to pay cash for the domestic connection, you're left with paying either 150K, 180K, 200K or 325K of SkyMiles, or some combination thereof, for an international round-trip ticket to Europe in J (or the equivalent to Asia).

I don't know your exact dates of travel, but I looked at the October calendar for BDL-ICN on united.com for comparison. Four dates came up showing First/Business availability on United or Star Alliance partners all the way through (November has 21), but when I looked at five of the other dates at random, I saw that you could book into F/J for most of the journey, just not on the single-cabin connecting flight for BDL-IAD, which is probably why the calendar looked the way it did.

Obviously, Delta is giving its SkyMiles customers the short end of the stick when it comes to using them for award travel. It's not just the award calendar that is broken, but the seat allocation system for awards as well. DL should be allocating some seats for the domestic connections to/from the international gateways.

indufan

You want to read my post again. I said thebat said that!
How do you figure I meant that. What I said is what I meant, I checked one set of dates and found plenty of low availability.

But, since we are at it...what the hell

BDL-DTW Low availability found on
Sept 18,19,20,22,23,25,26,27,28,29, and 30.

32,500 on the 21st and the 24th.

aviatorzz

I haven't quite learned how to read yet.

mother-

Sorry, you are more or less correct and I am more or less wrong. On a number of those days there might be exactly one flight available at low levels in Y, however I'm not seeing them on all the days you're claiming.

Regardless, the flights that could get me to/from DTW when I need to go are not available at low (Y or F), unless I spend at least 2 nights in hotels in DTW, oddly there is nothing distinguishing about the flights that have a low seat available except that they're always on the crappiest equipment or at the crappiest time- no matter if they are currently no emptier than the other flights.

So my new model for how award seats work is this: If Delta thinks there is the remotest prayer of selling out a flight there will never be any low awards available.

It fits my observations MUCH better.

mnredfox

I too have noticed a huge decrease in domestic low availability in the past year.

MSPeconomist

The differences in availability that you're seeing could be a matter of not being logged in (are you?) or differences in enhanced availability between PM and DM, which IIRC was reported here a while ago although our KVS rep has questioned whether there is a difference.

mother-

I was logged in, and it very well could be that I'm only PM- good catch.

dcline414

I believe that a rep on the DL GM line told me that there is enhanced award availability for GM+ but that there was no difference between GM and DM in terms of availability (i.e. only one 'enhanced' availability tier). It is possible that she meant that DMs would have no better availability on the flights I was booking than I did as GM, but the way she said it implied that there would never be any difference between GM and DM.

I may have understood incorrectly, or the agent may have been misinformed, but I think this might be a useful data point in discussing enhanced medallion award availability.

MSPeconomist

IIRC the previous discussion about this issue, KVS was displaying separate availability bucket codes for GM versus PM and had been for quite some time. I then asked about the DM bucket and he was skeptical about whether PM and DM were truly different. This might be burried in th huge KVS thread in this forum.

KVS

Separate Elite Award Booking Classes definitely exist (and are recognized by the KVS Tool) for SM, GM and PM tiers: http://Help.KVSTool.com/#DL

However, we have seen no evidence of a DM Booking Class.