theglobalnomad1

I used the KVSTool (fabulous and very user-friendly, BTW!) to find my award ticket (ATL/DUS) at the lowest level, but as I was booking it on DL, agent told me there was only 1 C class seat on the ATL/DUS leg left. I booked it and booked my poor hubby in coach to avoid spending an extra 100,000 miles to get him up there, too!

My question is...do those award levels ever drop and if so, when do they usually post? The number of seats sold has been stable and we're about 35 days out. Business Class is still showing the peak award level and I am hoping it will drop at least to the mid-level so I can "upgrade" him. Does this ever happen, and should I hold off awhile, knowing I can always pay the extra 100,000 miles to get him a Business Class seat, too?

MSPeconomist

I'm confused. If there was really only one BE seat left when you booked, surely DL would have charged you high miles for an award seat. Regardless, whatever you paid for your ticket, it's unlikely that there will later be another BE award seat on the flight for anything less than high miles.

OTOH, if you mean that there was only a single BE award seat at either low or medium, then a lot depends on how well the BE cabin sells for the flight. Often additional award inventory is released close to the flight date, but of course not when almost all BE seats have been sold.

tentseller

I have seen BE dropped to low level within a week of the flight; probably due to low load.

But if you do not have high enough status it will cost you to redeposit the miles from a cancel ticket to get a new one lower.

emrdoc

From reading her post, I think she means there was only one seat left at low level.

dd1612

Yes, it does happen ... as DL RM releases BE seats one at a time usually at 4 -5 weeks out, then at 2 weeks out and again at 1 week out. Sometimes even as late as T-48 hours or T-24 hours have seen BE seats released at low award levels. Now obviously as a DM it could be that better availability is visible.

Now whether you have or don't have PM/DM status, one can always call and ask for a change to BE from Economy by paying the extra miles.
Whether you will get charged the $150 fee is upto the CS Agent.
Usually they don't charge if one is going from Economy to BE .... but you can never tell!

mot29

Absolutely -- so long as you are outside the 72 hour change point. On trips to Asia, I've gotten 60,000 and 30,000 refunded to my account. Once it also involved a change of routing that cut out a stop and I got some taxes refunded as well. But you need Plat and Dia status to avoid the change fee.

roknroll

I have seen it drop. Not really any way to determine when it will though, it totally varies. Setting up an alert through Expert Flyer (won't work for DL) or using the daily automated search with AwardNexus is a great way to monitor it passively and be notified when something is available.

Denolloyd

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_1_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11D257 Safari/9537.53)

All the time. In fact, I often find more inventory available as the flight date approaches. I recently booked JNB-ATL at the low tier. It opened up about a week before the flight. Prior to that, I had to route through Europe. Such has been my experience across the board.

MSPeconomist

I would have thought so, but the OP explicitly says only one C seat left, not one O seat. To me, C either means explicit C class, expensive unrestricted business class inventory bucket, or generic business class. It's not an award code at any level.

GRALISTAIR

The short answer is - yes mileage levels do sometimes drop for award seats. I have experienced it.

FlyAO2

OP mispoke...because the next sentence said she didn't want to spend an extra 100,000 miles to upgrade him to business


To the OP: Mileage costs REGULARLY drop. Gone are the days where they would release a few seats early and then once they're taken they're done. Nowadays, if you cannot find availability it is more likely that they never released seats rather than they were taken. Just have to keep monitoring