Grogs

Hi all,

Apologies if I missed this in my brief search. I'm getting ready to book some tickets on Air France in PE. The flights will be one domestic leg on Delta metal followed and two international legs on AF metal. I was planning to book through Air France because I will get ~3X the MQDs over booking on DL. When I look the flights up on airfrance.us, it shows the delta cabin as either ECO or AF_ECO. I looked at the details and it shows an A fare class for all legs. When I look the same flights up on delta.com, it shows first class on the Delta flights. Does anyone know if I would be seated in first, C+, or main cabin on the Delta flights if I book these through AF?

Grogs

I booked my flights so I'll answer my own question in case anyone else searches this in the future. The Delta app shows my seats as Unassigned Comfort+(A), seat will be assigned at check in. Luckily it's a short flight on a CR9 so there aren't really any bad C+ seats I can get stuck in.

flyerCO

If you booked through DL you'd get F on the domestic flights. However all partner PE fares only book into C+ for domestic flights.

Weekend Away

​​​​​​That seems silly. Why is that the case? Why wouldn't they book into the same class?

ethernal

Because Delta is an outlier and calls Comfort+ "W" (which is premium economy). When marketing fares for Premium Economy on partners, other airlines are going to look for W availability, not F availability.

flyerCO

DL does it because it's DLs own fare. I highly suspect at some point DL will do away with giving F free for booking PE fares. They only have done so I believe to promote the new PS service.

bennos

IME INTL W booking into domestic F on DL tickets (1) has been around long before "Premium Select" (ie: when buying partner W) and (2) is highly route dependent. As a general rule, short haul segments (where F doesn't sell and you'd probably get a complimentary upgrade anyway) book into F, while long haul (eg: TCON) book into Y/W.

KDCAflyer

Once PE is installed on most of the fleet, I'd guess that they'd have to do away with access to FC simply due to capacity concerns. You can't have every FC cabin sold out weeks in advance, especially on feed-heavy routes.

pvn

that's been their stated goal

in any case, if they didn't mean for premium select to ticket into F on domestic connections over the long term, they wouldn't have used the P A G buckets.

KDCAflyer

Nope, I still think this is a temporary arrangement. Especially since last-minute FC fares are still often sold, and letting the inventory sell out weeks in advance for what is often a discount price doesn't make sense.

Grogs

Thanks for the info. IIRC, the PE = domestic F only started around 1 October of last year. I had some Air France flights the last week of September booked through DL and got assigned to C+/W then. They actually changed the fares to GAP fares just before I flew, but I wasn't moved to F on the domestic flights. FWIW, booking these flights through AF cost me ~ $50 more than going through DL, but I'll earn about $3600 more in MQD. Since I'm unlikely to meet the MQD spending waiver, it's worth the trade off to me.

bennos

I suspect if we compare the amount of domestic seats available against the amount of international premium seats we will find capacity concerns not to be a meaningful issue.

IME it's been around longer than that (on a route dependent basis).

gooselee

FWIW I've experience both when booking via DL, even on the same trip. But...it seems to depend on how I search and select fares, and the ones booking into domestic F are slightly more expensive.

Example - flying ATL-JFK-LHR and back with the TATLs in VS PE. The outbound ATL-JFK booked into G, with a seat in FC, but the return JFK-ATL booked into W, with a nice C+ seat. I got this combo after searching for Main Cabin fares but then choosing flights out of the Premium Select column.

If I edited my search and chose "First Class" instead of "Main Cabin" on the search page, I could pick the exact same flights except JFK-ATL booked into A, with a seat in FC, for ~$150 more.

I chose the lower fare as C+ is just fine for me on the domestic hop. And, lucky me, DL is now offering me FCM on that one leg for only $712.50!

mot29

Route dependent maybe.
Almost 4 years ago, booking ORD-JFK-LHR-JFK-DCA, using VS real premium economy I booked into F for the domestic legs. Maybe this was a VS thing? Tickets on 006 stock,

flyerCO

There was a time partner PE fares booked into F domestic. However that went away around 2 years ago I believe.