pvn

That has to be shopped

Syzygies

No one who ever travels internationally would spend miles at 1.2 cents domestic Y if they could instead realize 2-4 cents/mile J. I need to do something with a lot of Amex points, to finish migrating to Delta Reserve Amex, and transferring to Delta is one option. I could not find a single trip whatsoever that I could imagine taking, in J for better than 1.4 cents/mile. And that was an outlier. This was searching a week or two ago. Miles have become a consistently valued alternative to cash, with the faint benefit of refundability up to a few days before travel. No magic left that I could see. 2-4 cents/mile I'd jump on.

In other words, I believe the site that estimates 1.2 cents / mile today.

Renes Points

That THAT is for one vs the clearly not misleading 2 from the OP above! ;-)

ethernal

United's Saver Award level is 65-85K for J (depending on region), and they actually have a decent amount of availability at that level. Are you implying that you can get J trips to Asia on quality carriers for only 2K? Or to Europe for $1.6K? Those are economy prices, not J prices.

You are just wrong.. I don't know how else to say it. It is well known that International J redemptions have greater value than domestic Y. Even international Y has greater redemption value than domestic Y on average. There is actually an underlying reason for - on average (across all routes at least), it is easier to do supply/demand balancing for paying customers on domestic high volume routes as opposed to once a day international routings. Excess capacity will be allocated to saver award levels to help encourage traveling less popular routes. This is less needed in domestic routes where you can more aggressively adjust frequency, gauge, and have more alternative routing options via different hubs to balance demand.

flyerCO

Give it up. Obviously you didn't read where I explained exactly what I was meaning. Good grief. The comment was to show that following the logic of the replied to comment, that it would be perfectly ok to purposefully mislead, as long as you included a picture. You could purposefully mislead and it wouldn't be misleading, per the commenters standard. It was not a statement about the OP post.

Tone and language are tricky things to deal with when it comes to written communication. When you talk to someone, the person's body language, tone of voice, intonations, eye contact, pitch, and general demeanor give you essential clues about what the other person is feeling and meaning. These don't come across in written communication.

Hopefully that explains the issue here.

No the poster was not purposefully misleading. No I didn't mean to imply he was. However because of the above I can understand how it could be taken that way. However I've since clarified multiple times what I was meaning.

heckler

Using 1.8 million skymiles for ANYTHING seems ridiculous - you'd flush your skymiles balances down the drain. Things i'd rather experience include getting hit by a skychef truck or catching cholera

Halloweverybody

IF you fly chicago to jnb instead of Detroit on the 25th to the 7th, the delta one price is only $4956.
if you have a skymiles card you can pay with points, bringing the total to 495,600 per pax, which is a bit better.
But I guess the best part of booking points is it is refundable.

Syzygies

I flew United business this May from SFO to Madrid, returning from Marrakech, for 150K miles. The two legs between SFO and Zurich alone sold for $10K USD. That's nearly 7 cents/mile. These award tickets are trivial to find.

Try as I may, I can't do better than 2 cents/mile, looking for business awards from Delta SFO to Europe next May. That's better than the 1.2 cents/mile I was seeing from JFK, when I searched before. That's still nothing like what United has on offer.

Repooc17

Finding high value award redemption is not hard, maybe not with Delta SkyPeos, but as long as you are flexible with dates, and redeem either early or last minute, saver award types are generally available. For example, I have a business class redemption on JL from NYC to India with an overnight stopover in Tokyo for 60K.

RealHJ

Sure, but that has nothing to with DL. You could never get anything even close to that with Dullta's SlyMiles.

With OW and *A (*A esp.) there are a lot more redemption offers on most routes than SkyTeam.

Repooc17

I am replying in the context of the below:

I think we can all agree on the redemption value for most SkyPeso awards are poor, especially on J/F awards (Y is actually pretty good, especially during a flash sales). However, I am not sure if leveraging transfer partners (e.g. AMEX MR) for Delta redemption is the best route, as there are a lot of other good ways to use them. Of course, to each its own...

rylan

I thik the point/takeaway here is that the dynamic award pricing is very much in action for intl J award tickets as well... DL is closely associating award pricing with the cash price of tickets.

Remember a couple years ago when some of us expressed serious concerns that this scheme would result in intl J tickets becoming excessively priced and unattainable? Well that is the reality here now.

In effect DL has instituted monetary award pricing like WN has but they just masked it better. 1.3-2c per mile for awards redemption is commonly found.

enviroian

I'll never complain about AA's award redemption again.

Ever.

Kacee

It's really hard to get a UA saver J award SFO to Europe as well. And if you book as a UA standard award, you're going to be right in that same 1.5 to 2 cpm range.

I get good value using DL miles TPAC and intra-Asia. I flew BKK-SFO on CI in May for 95k DL miles. Priced as a half-RT, that penciled at 2.5 cpm; priced as a OW, 3.2 cpm. (Very similar to redeeming UA for BR on same route.) I've gotten similar values booking KE intra-Asia with DL miles.

To me the most frustrating issues using DL miles are (1) inferior partner carriers, and (2) no change/cancel within 72 hours of departure. I do therefore find UA miles more valuable for my purposes.

ethernal

Agreed that UA is more stingy out of their hubs (as is Delta of course) but there's still a huge difference between UA and DL miles on non-saver awards. UA is really good about having availability at their "everyday" rate on almost all routing assuming you book at least month or two in advance (and also some great last minute availability). I may have to pay 300K to get to SFO to Europe on a regular award, but that gives me a ton of flexibility. Want to book Monday to Friday and connect to EWR or IAD in Polaris? UA says "sure, go ahead!"

With Delta, if I want to get the "low low" rate of 460K to book a month in, you better fly out Tuesdays and you better want to take that funky two stop route... oh, and by the way, one of those legs is in Economy. Oh, wait, you wanted the non-stop or one-stop? That's 650K please. Wait, you really wanted to fly out on Monday? That's 750K. Delta makes their "high tier" award availability feel like searching for saver award levels on other programs.

To play devil's advocate, UA does block some very high demand routes even at the Everyday level if you start booking too close to departure - whereas Delta will pretty much always give you a ticket (even if at exorbitant rates).


Definitely some good redemption values on Delta partners (especially if you avoid the JV ones). It's unfortunate that Delta makes it hard to find these (whereas UA is very good at putting every possible partner option in front of you).