Award Ticket Mileage Devaluation Again
 

Appears to me DL is raising the mileage required for domestic coach flights.

Booked NL at 17.5k last week NYC-LAS for next March. This week NL is 18.5k.

It's all dynamic now so price changes on a day-to-day basis aren't uncommon.

LGA-LAS and EWR-LAS still have an NL level at 17.5K. JFK-LAS has an NK level at 18.5K. I see an NL level for JFK-LAS at 8.5K miles.

Not so. Availability at the different levels may change daily (just as they did before). But the levels themselves do not change nearly that frequently (think once every few months). They may also make some additional lower levels available on certain routes for the monthly 48 hour flash sales. Although there a couple dozen or so domestic coach levels, there are only typically use 5 - 7 different levels on any given route. In this case, DL is actually treating LGA-LAS, EWR-LAS, and JFK-LAS separately.

Here are levels on JFK-LAS

8.5K, 11.5K, 15K, 18.5K, 29K, 31.5K, 46K

Levels on LGA-LAS start at 12.5K , EWR-LAS start at 10.5K (I'd document all the levels on these, but it takes awhile to filter out the broken fares. May do it later tonight.).

Just like usual here at FT, unsubstantiated claims of devaluation. This has gone one ever since this has been here. Occasionally, I check availability and time and time again, it is still available for the same old numbers. BUT WAIT, I checked today and found numbers far better than I had seen in the past. 17,000 roundtrip to Florida in January.

I have seen situations when prices have changed once or twice over the course of a week with the underlying booking class not changing.

this prompted me to look at my ITH-DCA trip for Oct ... I thought 14k miles was decent for a seat that was selling for ~$250, but I can get a flight leaving ELM a few hrs later for 7.5k miles ($221), and that's actually much better in terms of not having to potentially skip out early from an alumni board meeting

Yeah this doesn't seem like devaluation...? The booking class for JFK-LAS is NK and the fare basis is YSK185. This seems like they dropped the peak pricing to 18.5k, rather than raised the NL pricing.