Delta Skybonus Certificate devaluation
 

Nearly two years ago, Delta, Air France and KLM embarked on a strategic initiative to align booking classes to provide a more streamlined experience to travelers and to help better manage processes for customers behind the scenes. Delta Air Lines is pleased to announce that the final step of the booking class alignment is now taking place.

As part of this process, some SkyBonus certificates will be affected. We have identified your account as having one or more of these certificates.

Effective March 19, 2013, your certificate booking classes will change as follows:
For travel on or after March 20, 2013 - Your certificates valid in "A", "H" or "U" booking classes will be replaced with "G", "Q" or "T" booking classes, respectively. If you have already booked your certificates in "A", "H" or "U" booking classes, they will automatically be rebooked into the new respective classes.
For travel on or before March 19, 2013 - Your certificates valid in "A", "H" or "U" booking classes will remain valid in "A", "H" or "U" booking classes. No further action is required.
Please note that although the certificate classes of service are changing, the new booking classes will have the same availability as the current booking classes.

this should just be part of the class realignment that's going on... same depth, different letter....

Why is this a devaluation?

I guess the big question is, are those new G/Q/T fare buckets going to be equivalent in terms of availability and price as the current A/H/U buckets.

They're throwing more letters in, so it seems things will get more complicated and price differences between buckets will be less, but it might make it more difficult to book.

It is a devaluation because these new booking classes sit below the existing booking classes:


F9 P7 A0 Y9 B9 M9 H9 Q9 K9 L9 U9 T5 E5


:td:

I still don't see the devaluation just because of class rank if their is still the same availability.

It's not clear to me that this is true. That is the current ranking of fare classes. What is the new one?

They claim at least that the new classes have the same availability as the old ones.

The new fare class structure is as follows:

J, C, D, I, Z, O*, F, P, A, G, R*, Y, B, M, S, H, Q, K, L, U, T, X, V, E

They do appear to be moving SkyBonus certificates down one bucket in all cases.

Thats where I don't believe them... I would expect that the new classes will have slightly lower availability due to the same total inventory being spread over additional buckets.

They have always been "A" for SkyBonus

Vuelos - they are moving to G from A, Q from H, T from U- I think that is what the concern was.

Well the point is that there may be the same number of U and T available when a flight goes on sale, but the lower class will always sell out before the one above.

If people are searching by lowest fares (99.999% of flyers), they are going to buy T until T sells out and gets to U9T0.

(Yes, someone is going to point out the almost impossible scenario where at U9T5 two groups of people come along wanting blocks of 6 tix and are pushed into U, making it sell out before T, but it's extremely unlikely.)

It's not a HUGE thing, but it is certainly a negative.

You are taking an overly simplistic view of how revenue management works a flight... It's not like 20 seats are held for T and 20 for U and when those 20 T are gone they are never coming back.

Long time lurker - I have some insight into DL.

First off let's be clear - this does not devalue your skybonus certificate. While H and U have been "downgraded" one fare class, you forget that 2 fare classes (X and V) have been added at the bottom of the fare structure. T will no longer be the lowest fare class, usually reserved for sale fares - it will be replaced by X and V. Depending on the fare bands, the new T may actually have higher fares than the current U - you may have actually received an upgrade here.

On the F cabin front, A has always been the lowest buy up class. This is now replaced by G as the lowest buy up class. The new P and A will be used to further segment the large gaps between F,P,A that currently exist. G will still sit above RU so it's not like inventory isn't going to fall to the new G.

Why would you think that G inventory won't be less than A? There are the same number of seats, but its now being divided over F/P/A/G instead of just 3 buckets. Previously, A was limited, then there were lots of P, and F was the least seat(s). Now G is going to be some smaller subset of A.