flyerCO

So it's fine to purposefully mislead as long as there's some small point somewhere in a picture that can easily be overlooked?

Nowhere in those 14 words does it say for 2 passengers. Absent anything else the price listed assumes is for one. I could book ten 100k J tickets and say look how bad DL is with 1,000,000 J RT otherwise.

CPMaverick

I think you are trying to purposely mislead people to think that the OP purposely misled us! Very misleading!

There's no evidence of being purposely misled by the OP. If they didn't post the image, sure, ok. But they did, and it shows the price per passenger TWICE and in addition clearly states that there are 2 passengers. If that misleads you, you aren't trying.

This just proves my point that someone was going to nitpick this to death and not care about the actual point, 900k per person!

flyerCO

Again you're putting words into people's mouths. NO one said he purposefully misled. However that doesn't change the fact that it is misleading.

omaralt

i love flying delta and almost always use them when using money. i just wish there was a way i could credit the miles to AA or UA

just as a point of comparison i'm flying BA from LGW to TPA nonstop in November for 57.5k AA miles and ~$200/person in business. and i was able to snag 4 tickets as well

DiverDave

This reminds me of the infamous find by redtailshark a few years back of NRT-SIN for 635K miles or something like that.

And apparently PHL-FCO.

https://insideflyer.com/forums/threa.../#post-1793660

So the disease has been there a long time, now it's spreading and getting worse.

xliioper

Basically, there's only CSY4650 inventory open on DL metal for every date after Jan 1. As you can see below, there are a few dates in December with CSV1200 awards (the search is for non-stop ATL-JNB). Not really news that SYD/JNB/HNL premium cabin awards are very tight (it's probably been that way for a good 4 years at this point).

xliioper

In 2012 the award charts were still around, so I suspect there were details that were left out in that post (multiple pax, etc.). No screenshots or other additional info at all. Yeah, we know the awards are very high. Does that make it right to post misleading information (like OP)? Sorry for preferring to deal with actual facts.

FlyingUnderTheRadar

I am thinking that it is time to update the terminology. The peso has been relatively stable over the past decade. I think it should be called the SkyBolivar.

ethernal

I like to think of SkyPesos as being the Argentina Peso rather than Mexican Peso these days

CALlegacy

The point is not that you can find ridiculously overpriced awards or flat out glitches. The point is whether you can not ever find reasonably priced awards. It has already been mentioned that JNB and SYD are examples of destinations that probably are just not in the pool on maybe any airline. People have known forever that effective use of frequent flyer miles takes skill, time, and effort. I do sympathize with people who may have mistakenly equated the award of some miles with free ranging "free flights."

swingaling

Unless one is a shameless Delta bootlicker, this is objectively a horrendously bad deal (by any rational metric).

True, but it rolls off the tongue so much better than SkyZimbabweanDollars.

GRALISTAIR

Well I would not pay 900000 SkyMiles for the trip. I get better value for my miles IMHO elsewhere. I brought my daughter, son-in-law and 3 grandchildren (youngest 7) from Shannon Ireland via JFK to Dayton Ohio for a 3 week vacation in July for 350,000 TOTAL. Now that I thought was a real good use of SM - but hey- each to their own.

CALlegacy

Which illustrates exactly my point. There is nothing to admire here in how Delta or any other of the airlines run these programs, but finding ridiculous excesses means nothing. It is possible to find equally ridiculous excesses in paid for tickets. You could pay about $12,000 in money for that route which comes out as about 1.3c/mile value, which is pretty typical for value of a FF mile. This is no apology for Delta but rather testimony to the absurdity of cherry picking pointless (or not so pointless) examples.

ethernal

The average value of a FF mile on International J trips is much higher than 1.3 c/mile for other airlines - closer to 3-4 cents/mile on average. Delta is far and away the worst of the big three when it comes to International J redemptions - it's not even close.

gregsfortytwo

This is true today, but I don't think it will be true in the future. Airlines could previously provide outsized value on international J/F flights because only people who'd already flown a *lot* of miles on the carrier could amass enough miles for those trips anyway — it was part of an award program that would seriously increase customer retention.

But at this point, most miles don't come from flying — they arrive via credit cards. If anybody in the country can get 70k miles by signing up for a credit card, giving away free premium-cabin long-haul flights for 70k miles becomes a much more expensive proposition than when it required sitting in the airline's planes for 14 cross-country round-trips, doesn't it?

I'm not sure if Delta's rewards program is "worse" simply because they're looking farther ahead; if more people have taken advantage of them because of Amex; or if their smaller alliance means the pain is more immediate. I am sure this is an inevitable result of the credit card rewards train all the airlines are on.