Booking Delta Award Tickets, 2015 on
 

This is meant to be a replacement on the "The Definitive How to Search for Low Level..." thread that now contains outdated information.

I will add all of the info I know to the wiki to start.

Thanks, subscribing.

I am done adding info to the wiki, for now. Please feel free to add any info I missed.

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Thanks for doing this!

If you first book a one way award ticket, can you add to it later to make it into a RT or OJ without cancelling and finding award inventory in both directions at the time of ticketing? If not, this would ba a way to force some people to get two one way tickets and hence pay the foreign origination fuel surcharges.

Good effort, michael_v.

You might be more specific here: Multi-city award search on delta.com is broken.

Multi-city award search can work fine. Try, for example:

DTW-FLL destination

FLL-MSP destination

MSP-DTW destination

It can yield the sum of award mileage by the three segments, just as it should under present rules.

One thing that doesn't work with multi-city is segment-by-segment searching AAA-BBB + BBB-CCC where one anticipates the resulting fare will be award mileage per the charts for AAA-CCC. The pricing engine doesn't do that reliably, even with a valid routing, carriers, and connection times.

Thanks, I have added that information.

I have been looking for BE award flights MSY-ATL-JNB and GIG-ATL-MSY for November 22nd outbound and December 12th return. I could never get miles under 320,000 per passenger until yesterday when I changed the return to a December 13th return and miles per passenger dropped to 200,000 to cover the flights. I jumped on that bad boy before the Delta computers realized it was me and would bump the miles back up. :D

So, I was able to save 240,000 miles by staying an additional day in Rio De Janeiro

You would have been able to find that out yourself by first looking at just one way flights MSY-JNB and one way flights GIG-MSY. That would have told you that the return flights were what were bumping up the mileage. Once you find the dates for the pricing level you want, you can then choose those dates like you did for (hopefully) the price you expect.

Thanks fti, I did not realize that, but will use that information for the next time...very much appreciated

I'm having a lot of trouble booking SEA-UIO for this December... Searching OW by O&D SEA-UIO i get first(SEA-ATL)/coach(ATL-UIO). It's charging me 90k for that routing (even though the intl segment is coach, go figure).

My problem is, SEA-ATL is available in coach and ATL-UIO is available in coach. I understand married segment logic prevents the entire O&D ticket from being priced lower than any of the segments, but is it really possible that even though there are coach awards (L5) available independently they won't let me use it as a connection??

Really frustrated with this "OW award" and "no blackout dates" 2015 SM program....

Delta Points blogger reports the old way of searching segment-by-segment in low and feeding flights to an agent still works if you HUCA:

http://deltapoints.boardingarea.com/...ork-just-fine/

HUCA?

Hang up, call again

I am being told by 3 agents with different levels of confidence that, in case of schedule changes, they cannot re-book you on anything other than DL, KL and AF, even if award space exists on the partner airline (RO in my case). Has anyone else heard the same?

Edit to add: the last agent was able to add the RO flight to my itinerary and I saw that on dl.com, but was unable to proceed further, which makes me think that what I am asking is really not possible. But what if you go somewhere in Asia where there is no DL, KL or AF?