Restore Our Faith in SkyMiles: Examples of Cheap Awards?
So just as I am thinking about ditching Delta because of its increasing worthless skymiles, I come across what seems to be insanely cheap awards. I am looking at NYC – Honolulu for 10K miles (one way) in early December. I know early December is slow in Hawaii, but is that a real rate? I mean, United and Alaska ask about 22.5K each way for the same route (with Alaska occasionally being generous with 17.5K awards). If it is not a glitch, what other examples of cheap awards in economy (or other classes) do you often come across? Help me restore my faith in skymiles.
I found San Diego - Kalispell/Bozeman - San Diego for 6,500 miles each way for an August trip to Glacier National Park/Yellowstone. I'm not a Delta flyer and was so shocked I contacted one of you to ask if it was a mistake. Nope, it wasn't. I felt as though I had won a jackpot.
Another example: most of my redemptions are with UA and AA miles. It's been years since I've found easy domestic F redemptions. Yet this month I found several desirable dates and routes for SAN-SAV in F (25K for one, one way).
Programs: AA EXP, HH Diamond, IHG Plat, Hyatt Plat, SPG Gold, MR Gold, Nat'l Exec, Avis Presidents Club
Posts: 14,174
This is one bright spot amongst an otherwise dismal award travel landscape on DL: advance purchase economy tickets are more available and cheaper than they have ever been. Ever since dynamic award pricing has been introduced, this has trended better and better. Meanwhile, trying to redeem miles for long haul premium cabin travel is worse than ever. I posit that this is probably exactly how DL wants it. Once people are accustomed to international J tickets costing 10-20x as many miles as domestic coach tickets, then it's not that big of a jump to fare-based award travel redemption.
With the crazy 80k+ mile tickets to Europe and Asia I have been getting a lot of value out of short-haul tickets, sometimes getting ~2cpp on tickets I've realistically been buying with cash. For instance I've been getting sweet 6k point awards on LGA-BOS.
Okay, I can pull up the 6.5K PIT-AUA awards with no problem (great deal, wish I could find something similar out of an airport closer to DTW). However, not seeing the NYC-HNL deal (cheapest is 22.5K for me). Anyone else seeing a 10K award and have a screenshot?
They exist, but Delta has coupled non-revenue inventory to revenue availability in recent years with only a few manually defined exceptions. That has made it a lot harder to find corner cases based last minute mileage availability. In the past, a ticket that may have been expensive from a cash perspective, would have a 25k RT trip was available up until the last minute if there was lots of extra inventory. This is not the case anymore as a general rule.
Here's one exception though: SEA-ORD is often 10k miles with good availability at the last minutes, as this is a new route. Typically that's 3-4 cents per mile, and can be much more valuable at the last minute.
I posted earlier this week about PDX-NYC being available for 10k and SEA-JFK for 9k next *summer*, which is kinda remarkable given that it's high season.
Okay, I can pull up the 6.5K PIT-AUA awards with no problem (great deal, wish I could find something similar out of an airport closer to DTW). However, not seeing the NYC-HNL deal (cheapest is 22.5K for me). Anyone else seeing a 10K award and have a screenshot?
It looks like the 10K NYC-HNL disappeared, but here is the snapshot of the fare that prompted my original post.
I booked a RT J fare for my wife on China Airlines from TPE to ATH using 160k SM with minimal fees. If I bought it outright would have cost over $6k so I'm quite happy with that.
