LondonElite

I've been diligently saving up to buy a vacation condo in Florida. Finally I thought I had enough money but the developer increased the prices because of high demand. I borrowed some money from my brother and bought the condo of my dreams. Two months later there was a financial crisis and everyone was unloading these condos they could no longer afford. I was surprised when the mean developer didn't give me back the difference in price, and I was also annoyed that the State of Florida wanted so much in land transfer tax for a property I already owned.

rucksack

I'm sorry, but I completely disagree. Delta didn't get rid of their award chart to spite consumers – they got rid of it because not all flights within the contiguous 48 states are created equal. As someone who has both American and Delta miles, I much prefer Delta's system because I am frequently able to find reasonable, convenient mileage tickets on Delta to almost any domestic destination. In contrast, American almost never has 'saver' award availability on a convenient routing (let alone at all), and the 'anytime' availability is an absurdly bad deal.

Not to mention that the second 'problem' exists in the mileage chart system too – you could buy an 'anytime' award and have it drop to 'saver' after you purchase.

+100

Kevin AA

The tone of the OP's post was nasty to begin with. I haven't seen any replies that were worse.

What are we supposed to do, reply and quote with a "+1", reply with "yeah Delta sucks" and "yeah Delta shouldn't do that, that's really bad and mean"?

bigbuy

As a former grocer, the following would happen. Customer returns item for a full refund and repurchases at lower price. There is no fee to customer for giving refund. This is also what would happen at Amazon.
More amazing is Costco. You have 30 days to get a refund of the price difference if the price of the item you bought goes down. Again, no fee to customer.
I'm not taking up for poster, just stating the facts.

rucksack

Meanwhile, the price goes up for everyone.

bigbuy

You are correct on that for sure. BTW, what really used to get me steamed was when folks brought back stuff that came from my competitors including my competitors private label items.

ijgordon

Right, so Costco has a 30 day price "match" policy. Best Buy has, I think a 14-day price match (including if you find a lower price elsewhere). The airlines have a 24-hour price refund policy, unless the price drops by more than the change fee, then it's much longer. I guess it's easy to argue (objectively) that the airlines are worse. But not sure why the OP would have thought DL would be "better." And I guess you can chalk it up to less competition than in retail.

Adelphos

To be totally fair to the OP (who seems like just a semi-frequent traveler), airlines to have more strict policies regarding these things than other parts of the travel experience. For example, most hotels allow for cancelling and rebooking at no charge. The OP may have expected airlines to have a similar policy. The issue is the anger directed at Delta for standard industry practice.

flyerCO

OT, but you can return any item at Costco basically at any point you wish for a refund. (Seen people return 3 year old items, without question) Only exclusion is TV, PCs, and certain other electronics. Thus you can return and get money back, and then buy again. Its one of the things Costco is known for. (And actively support)

btonkid12345

In my opinion, DL DID get rid of the award chart to spite customers. They fly internationally, too, and think of all the stories we've read on here of people paying 350K miles per ticket for 2 one ways from JFK to CDG and they think this is "normal pricing" because they lack an anchor point.

It may be better for a knowledgeable, frequent flyer like you, to have some routes below 12.5K miles one way, but then DL could publish the chart and list domestic OWs STARTING AT a certain price, or list a range of prices. There are a number of ways to provide customers with your award levels transparently (and to respect your customers enough to assume they can process this information) then simply assumer customers are daft, they don't need a chart, and "the price is the price."

Righttt...this is why, adjusted for inflation, prices for many items at Costco have gone down? And why Costco remains one of the most profitable B&M retailers out there?

KDCAflyer

Can we lock this up?

miraclebear2003

This was one of my earlier posts. I first posted why I didn't think the OP was entitled to anything and that most people would agree with that. I tried to be polite and also welcome the OP to FT.

The only above prediction that was wrong was that this thread is still going on because not much new is being said (If you read though it there are a lot of similar posts). And now we're talking about Costco.

Let's move on.

IndyHoosier

LOL, trying to return private label items to another store??? People are amazing.

Kevin AA

I hope you banned the person for trying to defraud your business.

minnyfly

Do you think it's consumer-friendly to eliminate their ability to know what a "low" and "high" price is for award tickets? Remember, this is an award ticket. This is assumed to be after the customer has made purchases and flown flights under normal supply-and-demand conditions to earn a kick-back. Why should the award also be subject to airline-determined "supply-and-demand"? Since demand-based pricing has been primarily used to raise (often dramatically) award ticket redemption prices, the motive is clear. It's not to say, "Thank you, here's your free flight to the destination of your choice!"

The lack of AA's saver awards is a different, also egregious example of bait-and-switch. However, at least with their system you know what the low and high prices are, and one can book the lowest-priced award flight without worry of the price dropping next week.

UA's upcoming changes might be the best of both. Still a sizable quantity of saver awards bound by chart prices. But the "standard" award now varies, with a maximum cap close to today's maximum, potentially opening up award prices in the gap between the two, similar to Delta's. That's a change DL could have done instead that would be much more consumer-friendly.