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.

One thing I like about AMEX. International stuff they are pretty lenient. Don't really need to call in or make any notes.

My Chase card they want the dates.

There is still an ongoing issue (unless recently fixed at last, I've been told it's been on the list of major bugs to fix for years now) cards where the issuer doesn't support AVS and the AVS response is X. As some who've been involved in testing and rolling it out tell me, devs forgot to put in handling for that so the system simply hangs. I've had that confirmed to me several times. Basically, phone reps need to call the Delta merchant account processor and do phone auth, but most get confused and don't know how to properly do that (they need to find the #, the Delta merchant account, etc., and then key in the phone authorization properly in the system - all things that supposedly "Delta no longer trains" its staff in and that are hardly well documented). Online it works, but doesn't work by phone. By phone only works in the old reservations system/interface that was at least less buggy. Other than phone auth, that is the only other workaround for Delta res agents.

I am on the phone right now with Delta trying to book an Award that is being held and all my cards (Delta AmEx) are being declined.

If you login to your Amex account are they giving you an explanation?

It's quite possible it's a Delta.Dumb IT problem too.

Oddly I purchased two refundable tickets on VX a week or so ago that showed up as one transaction on the CC. The refunds came through separately though. Weird. Normally each ticket is charged individually.

They finally figured it out - seems my reservation was corrupted somehow and they had to rebuild it. Finally got tickets booked for the award and mostly in J. The last two-hour hop is Y but I'll live.

It is always like this when I book DL tickets (even paid) that involve other airlines. I still miss the old NW website that worked better than any other site before or since.

Very few merchants train staff in processing authorizations by phone. Mainly since for most that would mean their system is offline and a manual transaction would need be submitted. It just normally doesnt happen much For those times the system is online, but need a manual authorization number.

Delta.Dumb!

Exactly. It shouldn't happen. But it does with Delta, unlike with other merchants who believe in QA prior to release.

Delta customer service tells me Delta requires a street address and number- unfortunately my card is billed to work and we don't have a street address (our E-911 and USPS address lack a street name/number.) One of the delta supervisors helped me figure out a fake address that had enough of the actual address to validate, and still had what looked like a street address to it (even if the street is non existent.) She told me they do that for lot of military guys whose address is building XXX.


Never had a problem with other airlines, hotels, vendors etc. Nor does Delta have a problem when they receive the reservation electronically.

Yes, and online it'll work on delta.com, just by phone it won't as DL has tied their phone reservations reps hands behind their back by not allowing them to handle such situations (DL simply didn't bother to put in any handling for such a case, the new buggier than ever res system simply hangs; it's a well known bug that DL hasn't bothered to fix for years; impacts esp. a lot of international pax - but then again DL always makes it clear that it just wants to be a small regional domestic airline in how ignorantly and inconsiderably it does so many things... :rolleyes:).

One workaround is to get a phone rep to put the reservation together. Have them end it (save it). Then load it up online and see if you can complete the purchase it and ticket it online. That will often (not always) work.

In 5 years, I can count on one hand how often I've had to call for manual credit card authorization. It's not hard, but it is infrequent. Certainly not something that would require extensive training (manual credit card approval IS covered in training).

There is no "old" reservation interface. The current GUI rolled out in early 2013 and the old one was retired summer of 2013. There's Delta Term, which hasn't been worked in by frontline res reps in at least 10 years.

It's not taught to frontline reps anymore because the GUI can do all but 2 things an agent comes across in 99.9% of phone calls. (In case you're wondering, the two things are checking Minimum Connection Time, and unhooking a voucher from a PNR not yet ticketed. And both of those things ARE taught.) Now, to be fair, there are some other functions that can help a frontline specialist, like looking into an old PNR, checking the Upgrade Waitlist, etc. While there is a way to run cards through in DeltaTerm, it uses the exact same address verification system as the GUI, and I haven't had to use it in over a year, and that was because, as I mentioned earlier, a release of the GUI did have a bug that caused forms of payment to get hung up.

In my case I can only say that the agent described the transactions as card declined yet my bank has given me 5 authorisation codes which shows that they should not have been. This wasn't a funds issue as 3 of those 4 were for the full amount. The first was actually for just one of the tickets. Today the agent stated that the transactions must have been declined as no ticket was issued.

During today's successful transaction I heard the agent ask herself why line 2 of the address was a problem, and then she said she'd have to have a colleague on "another system" re-enter my card details so I had to give them again.

The TBM desk does handle address discrepancies, and they may be able to push things through that a frontline rep may not.

I believe I've dealt with them once, when a customer had a billing address on a US Military Base overseas.