SanDiego1K

I am waiting for award seats to become available. I know the first date that the seats might be available. Is there a specific time of day that Delta opens up the awards?

ATOBTTR

DL allows bookings to be made 331 days in advance. So the schedules for flights will be loaded 331 days in advance, along with award inventory. As long as you're looking for DL metal flights, award inventory should be available on any flight that still has seats available (what level of inventory will vary based on demand for that flight). If you're looking for partner flights, then it can happen whenever. You won't know when it's about to released to DL and may only know if you use a tool like Expert Flyer to assist.

My personal experience: the schedule loading begins at midnight ATL time. Sometimes it takes a while to finish (maybe 1 hour or so). Being 3 hours behind ATL on Pacific Time, for whatever reason, I also had to adjust the time/time zone on my computer when I was making an award booking 331 days in advance. I was trying to book it around 10 PM Pacific Time, which was still technically 332 days away - it was 1 AM in ATL - 331 days out. DL.com kept erroring out. I adjusted the clock on my computer to Eastern time, thus moving the date ahead and to 331 days out and then it all worked. I don't know if it was a coincidence or what (and I did this a couple days in a row as I was playing with inventory and options so it was not one isolated incident).

SanDiego1K

You're a star, ATOBTTR. That's great information, including adjusting my computer clock.

Mr. Tickets

Remember that just because you are looking for space at the first possible time to book, there is no guarantee that they will load lowest award space at the same time. In other words, there is no "rule" that they must release low reward space at any level. They may elect to not load lowest inventory at all.

SanDiego1K

I'm a novice at using Delta miles, and hopefully you can elaborate. How do you know if it is low reward space? I've seen mileage requirements on this particular route anywhere from 30K to 70K. 30K and 37.5K have been mid week. Larger numbers have been on the weekend. I suppose in the end it doesn't matter, because I know what the cash amount is, and therefore where my break is between points and cash.

ATOBTTR

Since DL no longer has a published award chart showing required mileage amounts for each cabin for each region, it's become more difficult. But through some searching, you can still find some baseline values to go off of. For example, current "Low" for TATL Business Class to Europe from the US is 140K miles round trip (last summer it was 125K r/t). Thus if you find a TATL J ticket for 140K miles r/t, you've found one for "Low". If DL is running mileage sales, you may even get lucky and find some below the "Low" inventory (last summer tickets were as low as 105K or so). If DL is charging is charging more than 140K r/t (say you found an itinerary for 200K miles r/t), then this is not the "Low".

One way to tell what the low is (at least for international travel) is looking for partner awards. For example, if you find a TPAC on Korean Air to ICN for 80K one way (160K r/t), this is "Low", as partner awards will always require what is the current "Low" rate (again, even though this won't be published), though there are also variations to this rule even. I haven't looked in a while but there was a point where to Australia, it was 95K one-way for J on partner Virgin Australia, while DL "Low" for LAX-SYD was requiring 110K one-way.

More specifically to Mr. Tickets' post - what he means by "there is no guarantee that they will load lowest award space at the same time" is that when DL loads the flight 331 days out, they may not elect to load it at their lowest inventory level. For example, DL rarely releases "Low" to SYD from LAX, even 331 days out. If you can find it, snag it (I got lucky and snagged 2 "Low" J tickets on partner VA to BNE from LAX for this past February, booked in April of last year). While "Low" in J on DL metal to SYD from the US is 110K in J now, it's not uncommon for DL to release the inventory charging 175K to 225K or more (I've seen as high as 400K one-way in J on the DL metal flight to SYD). But that doesn't mean that that flight won't come down from 350K to 225K or from 225K to 175K or 110K. It's all what DL's revenue management department decides.

Best advice is to have flexibility, play around with it, and if you see what you think is a good deal, book it. If you have questions about a specific amount for a specific route, you can always ask here for feedback (though of course, waiting for responses carries the risk of that inventory disappearing before you book and with this being FT, you may get varying opinions on whether it's a "good deal"). This is why one of the biggest benefits of Platinum and Diamond Medallion status - award redeposit fee waiver. We can book one flight and if something better opens up (better date or cheaper option), cancel and rebook without penalty.

SanDiego1K

Thanks for such a great job bringing me up my Delta learning curve.

MSPeconomist

I don't know whether award ticket receipt still show the (sub)fare class for award tickets, but if you see a two letter code such as ON rather than a single letter such as O for business class, it isn't low. At some point, someone here posted the hierarchy of the two letter fare class class codes for award tickets. DL permits free cancellation by midnight of the day after an award (or other) ticket is purchased (IIRC with the exception of award tickets within 72 hours of departure) so if you get a receipt that shows two letter codes, you can then decide whether to cancel.

Pharaoh

Why is "award" in bold red? I didn't type it in that way.

Zorak

I've had this happen to me too, though not necessarily with that word -- did you maybe recently do a Google search where "award" was one of the search terms and the followed a link in the search results to FT?

(After playing around with this a bit I think it's related to FT search and not Google search, but I still can't 100% replicate it.)

If that's the issue, you can fix it by going to your browser preferences and look at the cookies for flyertalk.com and one of them will be related to search results or something (I'm not in this condition right now, so I don't remember the exact cookie name) and delete that cookie and the word should no longer be highlighted.

ATOBTTR

If you do a search through FT with keywords, those keywords will be show in to bold red within the post as well when you view the post through the search function.

Zorak

Yep, I just edited my post above -- but sometimes it doesn't get cleared, so the bolded red term "sticks" and you see it highlighted everywhere you go. If that happens, deleting that specific cookie clears the result.

EDIT: ah, got it -- the name of the cookie to delete is vbseo_highlight

in Chrome you can go to Chrome > Preferences > Show advanced settings... > Privacy/Content settings > All cookies and site data... > search for "Flyertalk", click on vbseo_highlight and then click Remove. Other browsers should be similar except for how you actually get to the cookies.

levman

Another tip, particularly if you are a Platinum or Diamond and have the ability to redeposit points (so there's no risk): If you see a flight that meets your available points but has a crazy routing - it's worthwhile to book it and bide your time. If the points then drop at a later date on the routing you want, you can call Delta and they will make the swap for you. But more importantly, booking this far out there is inevitably going to be a schedule change. Delta's policy is that if your flight departure or arrival changes by more than an hour, you are entitled to change to another flight for the points already spent. I think this applies to any segment but I am not certain. While the policy is officially an hour, unofficially it seems to depend on the Medallion desk agent who takes your call.

I just did this for a TLV - CMH flight next January, which I booked on the first day it came available. My original routing, at 70,000 points, was TLV - JFK - DTW - CMH, departing TLV at 12:10 AM and including a 10 hour layover in DTW (ugh - but all the others were 100k times 4 tickets and I didn't have enough points for those). The TLV departure changed last week to 11:30 PM (40 minutes earlier) and with that change, the Medallion desk agreed to change my routing to the one I actually wanted, TLV - JFK - CMH with no DTW layover and getting me home six hours earlier. Schedule changes can be your friend!

SanDiego1K

Nice tip! I'm Delta nothing, but there will be folks with status reading this thread. That's a great suggestion for them. And for those without status who are willing to gamble on a future schedule change, it will work for them at well.

Pharaoh

Yes, I had done a search with 'award' in it ... but about a week ago and with at least one (probably two) system reboots since.

Thanks for the cookie tip ... I'll go delete that.

Annoying.

Edit: that worked ... thanks!