CAI-TLV Award Ticket: Is this even possible?
 

Given the hostilities between the two countries, it's insanely expensive to fly between them and you would technically need a connection on top of that.

Looking at delta.com though, it doesn't look like that even exists as a bookable route! For Oneworld, I can book an award ticket via AMM and on Star Alliance via ATH/IST, so it is doable, I'm sure.

What are my options with Skymiles?

Could book CAI-CDG-TLV on Air France or CAI-FCO-TLV on Alitalia. Comes up at 50k Skymiles when I checked. Book it as a multi city trip, not a cai-tlv one way.

Yes is possible. However limited flights means limited award availability. Do NOT price as multi city. You'll be paying twice the amount. N. Africa to ME Y class should be 25k.

Hmmm it doesn't seem like I can find any days at all to price out :(

Was really hoping to dump some with the missus.

Except I don't think DL will price out CAI-TLV at all, for revenue or Skymiles. It doesn't appear to be a valid route in the DL system. Tested it in a five week search, got "Uh-oh! We're sorry, but no results were found for your search. Some of our flights only operate seasonally or on select days of the week."

FWIW, Kayak doesn't find any options using Skyteam at all, nor any with oneworld.

Try calling DL.

Maybe TAROM has an option? Their availability isn’t on Delta.com, but it is a SkyTeam partner. Romania is out of the way, but not like Paris... They serve CAI on a seasonal basis.

Do they still? It isn't listed as a destination on their website... Only reference I can find is to offers of free cancellations after the 2011 terrorist attacks...

I confess to just looking at Wikipedia, because it was easy. So, YMMV for sure.

There are routes where DL does not sell revenue tickets, but still offers award redemptions. The current website award search has various issues right now as has been documented in several other threads. It always defaults to a flexible dates award search (even when specifying exact dates) and there are a number of routes where flexible dates search always fails, but where an exact dates search will succeed. There are a couple of workarounds to get the website into an exact dates search mode for awards -- the simplest is to just use m.delta.com. The other workaround is to use the app. However, after doing a number of exact dates searches on this particular route, I have yet to find one that succeeds. So I'm inclined to believe that DL does not consider it a valid award route.

I tried the exact date search first, and got the same error message, before I tried the monthly calendar search, just in case it was a "won't work on a specific date" issue.

I can't help with booking, but according to the Skyteam website, you're only routing options, one-stop, on Skyteam, are via CDG and FCO. Can you get to BEY? There's a non-stop on MEA. I can find availability via AF/KL, in Y for 15K Flying Blue points, but on DL only J for 40K Skymiles. For the one-stop, I can find availability on AF/KL for 34,250 Flying Blue points, via FCO, but I can't on DL. I get a weird Miles+Cash error message in the app when trying to pull up the same days. Good luck.

https://applications.skyteam.com/rou...stinations/TLV

Doesn't going to BEY make the process even more complicated? As far as I know, you can't cross the Lebanon/Israel border on land (at least not as an ordinary traveler), and there aren't BEY-TLV flights...

Staying within Skyteam, connecting through FCO seems like the best bet, followed by CDG.

Two more options. Royal Jordanian flies via Amman, priced about $210 one way. Ugly connection, though.

Air Sinai flies several times weekly nonstop. Maybe daily. Or maybe it's just one a week? It's difficult to book online but there should be online agencies which would handle them OR your hotel concierge should be able to obtain tickets, which should be in the $200-300 range, if you contact them early enough. I've flown them (they are a subsidiary of Egypt Air) and the flight is fairly routine except for really tight security. If you are up for a real adventure, yet safe, this is the place. Also see https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/new...article627176/

Ugh. I think at that price point, using miles would make a lot more sense though, no? I might try to spend some Avios then if I have any left laying around. Should be 4500 I think?