Wanna See Dynamic Award Pricing In Action??????
 

After seeing that they changed my 15hr flight from a 747 to the 777 I tried to see if I had other options for changing my flight.

These 3 searches were done within 5 minutes.....in the order of the photos....

Anyone have this happen???????

What the eff, Delta?????????:mad:

Yesterday I was searching a particular FRA-DTW itinerary and had the price raise about 80€ w/in 15 mins.

It's flip-flopping back and forth between showing 7 flights starting at 125K, and 11 flights starting at 112.5K (3 options on CZ and one on MU+FM) for me. This is all during the same session by the way (checking/unchecking flexible dates, departure time, etc). Looks much more like non-deterministic (aka buggy) search results than any sort of "targeting" of me personally.

Clear cookies.

DL agent once told me that our searches tie up their inventory on the short term which can elevate the price.

So, ya' mean it might not be a conspiracy plot to completely hijack and eventually end the SkyMiles award ticket program??? What would we have to bit$ch about?!?

;) :D ;)

I've definitely seen award searching influence short term pricing when I did similar search experiments. I don't think this is anything new, but just may be reacting faster due to whatever the dynamic pricing code is doing.

I was searching a local domestic flight a couple weeks ago (Montana to Colorado). Amazingly, there was a 10K RT available. A few searches later (over the course of a couple days) it was up to 45K. Very small airports, so my searching could have had a big impact on the award level. I guess.

Just reinforces my theory that if you see a price you like, buy it and don't worry about it.

Things to keep in minds as well - Inventory levels are also influenced by other people pricing/buying tickets. There are 5 tiers of award pricing on Delta but only 1 on partner airlines.

I tried to buy the 80k trip; it kept telling me the fare was gone after selecting seats and clicking "purchase." :(

Might want to try calling DL and giving them the exact routing you found for 80K online. They may be able to pull it up yet, especially if you weren't seeing "Only X seats remaining at this price"-type verbiage when doing your searches.

The word you were looking for it "garbage", not "verbiage". ;)

According to a DELTA agent I was speaking with she said that DELTA links award inventory to fare buckets.

So if DELTA detects searches and or purchases and that fare bucket sells out then award prices will go up as the next available bucket tied to awards is now the lowest available..

But award buckets are not assigned to all fare buckets so while the difference between two fares can be dollars different the same cannot be said about DELTA award prices which can be 10s of thousands of points different.

Such is the way of things in 2016.

Dynamic means just that--I was hoping a 60k pp first class o/w SEA-ATL on a 767 would decrease and, a few days later, I snapped it up at 45k pp.