TrojanTraveler

While there are good DL phone agents, I find that DL phone agents increasingly just make stuff up if they don't know the answer, or repeat back erroneous information from some of their clueless coworkers.

I'd be surprised if they are backing out of their deal with Virgin Australia now.

And to FederalFlyer's point, DL has many things broken with its IT for years, some important, and these issues are not fixed. DL used to have superior client-facing IT, but not anymore.

Wisdom

True. I don't know what I was thinking.

Wisdom

Again, I hope you guys are right. I need to book my return today. If only the Delta flight is available I'll have to book it. If the VA flight shows up in a few days I may book that one and pay to have my miles reinstated to my Delta account. The VA flight would save me 190,000 miles.

bgriff

When are you planning to travel? If you're not traveling in the next day or two, and the Delta flight is showing at some absurd number of miles (sounds like something close to 300K one-way?), then I would argue the risk in waiting longer is fairly small. It's not likely a flight already at a very expensive mileage rate is going to get more expensive, and given past trends, once VA is available again (I can't imagine it's going away with no warning, given the fairly deep partnership including ATI and a small ownership stake between DL and VA), there's an excellent chance VA award space will be available.

Main risk is that if you are traveling soon-ish, like 4 weeks out, it is unfortunately possible that this issue could linger for that amount of time.

Depending on your routing and flexibility, you may also be able to find longer but cheaper alternative routings. DL.com often offers JFK-SYD routings via ICN on KE for example.

Wisdom

Thanks for your response. I'm not traveling until Feb. 2016 but I only want to travel using miles. I'd hate to wait and have the seats no longer available. I'll contact Delta again today. Maybe I'll get someone that knows what's going on.

bgriff

Yeah I would definitely wait if I were you. I can understand the desire to book as soon as the calendar opens, but that trick is mainly meant to capture low-price award seats when they are available, which they aren't here. In this case you have a very high degree of certainty that the Delta flight won't get any more expensive for a while, and time to see what happens with VA.

Worst case, if the VA option doesn't come back, you could also pay the fee to cancel your currently booked outbound trip and consider other options, including paying cash (or miles) for a coach ticket or going somewhere else instead.

Wisdom

I tried posting an image but failed. Can't delete this one.

Wisdom

Thank you. I'll wait a bit if I can't get the information from Delta.

michael_v

DL acknowledged the issue and said they were working on it:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...er-update.html

Wisdom

Thank you for this post. Great job. Makes me feel a bit better. I'm glad I posted here, got the advise and waited to get my return ticket.
This site is very helpful.

Wisdom

You can say you told me so.

TrojanTraveler

Although the DL forum has gotten increasingly toxic, there are still lots of good people on here who provide their helpful, relevant expertise. Over the years I've gotten enormous value from it, and I do my best to return the favor.

Wisdom

I do appreciate that. I just to try to skip over the negative posts and look for credible answers from those that are trying to help.

SkyMilesTeam

All thanks for your patience. The root cause of the error has been identified and will be corrected early Saturday morning. Apologies for the inconvenience and please try again Saturday.

Wisdom

Fantastic. Thank you for the update.