Can't book award flight because all cards declined
 

I'm trying to book an award flight but all of my cards have been declined by Delta's system. A colleague couldn't book a paid fare last week because his card was declined.

Is there some secret to getting cards accepted on Delta? I've spoken to 2 agents today trying various cards and neither had any luck. One was my wife's using a totally different bank than mine. They are all non-US cards, 2 Visa (1 credit and 1 debit) and 1 MasterCard. The issues seems to be address related, as was my colleague's.

Banks are closed today so I can't get an exact reason why the cards were declined.

Banks are closed today, but the fraud department is usually working Call and ask if the rejection is showing up. I have done that nights/weekends/holidays in the past. That's my only suggestion. In my case the problem was a chip/pin (yes a real chip/pin) that was trying to be run without the pin.

That's probably the reason. Had that in the past. Call the fraud department and say you are trying to purchase a ticket on Delta, the US website.

Also, debit cards many times have maximum limits for transactions per day. Also, Delta is very finicky about addresses in general. I tried to do an online charge once, where I put in St. Paul and it would not work. Kept trying different things and it turned out delta.com
didn't like the period after St. Foreign address is more than likely the culprit.

If it's declined will show at card issuer as declined. Does it? Or does it show as authorized. It's most likely not declined, just that Dullta has a very buggy system for phone agents now and if AVS match isn't exact, then the Dullta system will VOID the AUTHORIZED charge.

Make sure that you give all the digits and zip code (5 or 9 digits, as on file with card issuer) to DL exactly as the card issuer has it. Any slightest mismatch in the address, or if the card issuer doesn't support AVS, will result in Dullta voiding the authorized transaction.

This has most likely nothing to do with card issuer and has to do with DL having a buggy and untested system for payment processing by its phone reps. It's a well known and documented problem, present for the last few years (ever since the downgrade in the res system). Basically, the Dullta developers never put in the error response and handling for AVS address mismatch or N/A - so it gets stuck at that point and the transaction will void (no way to handle it any other way, that part of the code never got done), and for years Dullta hasn't bothered to fix it, though they know it has to be fixed. The workaround is to get someone to use the old reservations/ticketing system which has a more functional payment gateway, as I've been told.

Just doing a +1 , +2 or whatever. Delta has frequently not processed my CC's for international travel without me first getting my CC to approve it, especially with Capital One. Annoying as can be. It will tell me that it wasn't authorized, but my CC is really just holding it in suspension of some sort until I approve or disapprove it. On the bright side, this can be potentially helpful if you think you want the flight, but aren't 100% sure as it appears to "kinda" book it at that price until you verify the info.

This is where Amex usually shines. You can handle 'random' declines on their website.

+1 for suggestion to call the fraud department. They're open 24/7 at most banks. They can see if the charge is even coming through or if it is, why it's being rejected. Worse case scenario they can add your card to an exception lost that will cause any charges on that day to be approved.

I couldn't get through to fraud yesterday although that may have been a Skype issue. But talk about complicated.

My bank says Delta ran the transaction multiple times on both my credit and debit cards and they were all authorised so this is a Delta problem. The 5th attempt raised a flag and their fraud system kicked in and started declining. Part of this is down to Delta billing each ticket separately, although some of the amounts are actually for all 3 tickets.

Today Delta said no tickets were issued as no payment was made, so they had to find all the flights again. Fortunately they were able to although it cost me 1500 points and $10 more. The agent then had problems with billing again but appeared to know more about why and said she'd get a colleague on another system to try and the payment went through OK. Except that it appeared at my bank as 3 transactions again, but each for 1/3rd of the total.

They really should resolve that - I imagine a lot of banks will decline multiple payments run through all at once, so a group of 5 would have problems with my bank for example.

So I now just have to wait to see if all of yesterday's transaction actually appear on my statement.

Even if you purchase on one PNR each ticket is a separate transaction. Can't be done otherwise to refund one ticket would mean refunding and cancelling all three.

Yet Delta have managed to bill me the full amount for 3 passengers as single transactions 4 times. Main cabin monetization? :):confused:

The pending amount will show as one amount. However in the end it'll show as one transaction per ticket.

Same problem here. I was booking flights with a foreign airline and did not get approved. A few minutes later my phone rings and it is a recorded call from the bank asking if I had attempted to make such-and- such transaction. I called them and sorted it out, but then, of course, I had to reenter all my data. Now I call the bank before the checking flights and tell them what I am about to do. Sometimes that works.

I could have used another card but I wanted to use a card that gave me extra cash back for travel and provided travel cancellation insurance.

The address verification system hasn't changed in years for Res. Don't know quite what you're talking about here. We have an error message sent to us when the address is wrong, if the CID/Expiration Date is wrong, if the card number is wrong, etc.

If the response comes back that card is declined, it means all information on Delta's side is correct, but the bank isn't authorizing the charge. This can be for a variety of reasons, the most likely is that there are not enough funds on the card.

Now this is where things COULD'VE been caused by the rep on the Delta side. If they don't put in the international billing address properly (there's a separate field for non US/Canada addresses), the card would've errored out due to the address being put in incorrectly. But it still pulls pending funds from the card. Then, when the address is inputted correctly, the agent wouldn't have received the wrong address, but not enough funds (or over a daily limit/suspected fraud) were available.

There was an update about 18 months ago that briefly caused hangups with card payments, but that had nothing to do with the billing address. It was quickly fixed.

Not quite on topic, but I was just talking to Chase about our Sapphire Reserve card and the agent mentioned that even though you can enter your international travel plans online, you can only enter the dates by calling in. He said that without the dates some of our international charges could cause them to temporarily suspend the card. It makes absolutely no sense that they can't just add the date feature on their website imo.