RRDD

https://www.inc.com/chris-matyszczyk...n-you-are.html

"Delta Is Being Accused of Sneakily Tricking People Into Booking Much Worse Seats Than They Think"

.... The accusation was that Delta Air Lines made ordinary Economy Class flights appear as if they were Premium Economy when booked via Google Flights. Or, as the Points-Saving God puts it: "Delta displays economy prices for Virgin Atlantic Premium Economy, and at no point during booking does it actually specifically tell you you've got the wrong deal." In essence, if you go through the Google Flights search process, wanting to book, say, return flights from London to LAX, you get what seems like a wonderful deal. If you book via Delta's site rather than its partner Virgin Atlantic's, that is. The price difference is more than $1,000. Which is clearly the very definition of a steal. Because you like saving money and feelings clever, you click on that deal and still believe you're booking Premium Economy. It's just that, if you look closely, it has a novel and delightful name: Economy Delight. This is actually Virgin's fancy name for something that's slightly better than so-called Economy Classic, but is still very much Economy Class and not the wider seats and more pleasant experience of Premium Economy. Which Virgin calls, oddly, Premium Economy. For all you know, however, Economy Delight is what Delta calls Premium Economy......

xliioper

Last time I checked, there's no way to book DL tickets on Google Flights. DL uses W fare class exclusively for C+ and P/A/G for Premium Economy these days, so it would be trivial for Google to identify C+ vs. PE flights if they wanted to add a new category to the drop-down.

Austin787

When you select flights, look at the details. On Delta Premium Economy, it says "Below average legroom (35 in)" while on airlines with real Premium Economy it says "Extra reclining seat".

xliioper

Well, DL does have an actual Premium Economy cabin on A359 operated flights (and soon 777) (Premium Select). So can't just generalize DL Premium Economy to mean C+. Further, VS now has basically both PE and C+ fares now with their Economy Delight seats. But I suspect that Google doesn't yet recognize the VS Economy Delight fare class (V). If Google doesn't want to add a new fare category and is worried about people being misled, they could just give DL W fares the same treatment as VS V fares and just ignore them and only recognize DL P/A/G fares as Premium Economy.

3Cforme

The authors of both God Save the Points and the Inc. article are fools looking for clicks. Delta doesn't determine how fare classes are displayed on Google Flights - Google does. This is like blaming Canon for the wrong camera description posted by Amazon when Amazon itself is the vendor.

pbarnette

gooselee

Based on this thread, they are very skilled at clickbait. I saw the GSTP blog post come up in my newsfeed and rolled my eyes at it. I guess Inc. has taken to just copying bloggers now.

abeille

Unfortunately, most Delta staff don't even know this. Just a few weeks ago I was rebooked from Premium Select into Comfort+ on LAX-SYD. I paid roughly double, and Delta's own literature describes PS, but the response I got was that Premium Select is equivalent to Comfort+. Still fighting them.

CPMaverick

And yet if you had booked C+, and had a plane swap, DL would tell you that PS is not equivalent to C+ and put you in the back.

They are not making friends with this transition at all.

Often1

The sole question is how DL markets and sells tickets on its website. What others do and whether they simply display, or market and sell, is up to them.

In fairness, part of this is caused by the marketing types who name products differently.

Delta One on DL, Club World on BA, and Polaris on UA. What if they all called it "Business Class"?

ijgordon

There was some fairly recent discussion on this very topic (OTA display of cabin class), I think re: Expedia though. IIRC, the "conclusion" was that it was on Expedia to correctly indicate what you're searching for / buying, but there was debate over whether it would be worth Expedia IT investing to essentially make a fifth class just for Delta.

ethernal

My recommendation to all travel booking sites (incl. CWT and the like): Have C+ map to Premium Economy, Premium Select map to Business, and Delta One map to First. Delta made their grave with their C+ as a fare class, let them suffer as their "Business Class" product is now out of policy for most corporate travelers who are stuck in their Business Class product (Premium Select)

jordyn

That's not true, because Delta has chosen to sell tickets through channels other than their website. More importantly, Delta is the only airline that I'm aware of has chosen to sell it's "slightly better coach product" as a separate fare class. So to represent that you can buy either a normal economy ticket or a Comfort Plus ticket a third party website has to be able to somehow distinguish between fare classes, and it's not that surprising that they end up doing s

I do think that most of the blame here is probably on Google Flights because it's lumping products together that are pretty different in practice, but the fact that Delta has made a decision to sell Comfort Plus in a different way than basically all of its competitors at least contributes to the confusion.

AeRoSpaceman

Article was updated today. Judge as you wish..

Delta Was Accused of Conning People Into Buying Much Worse Seats Than They Thought. Now There's More Damning Evidence

xliioper

As I mentioned above, Virgin Atlantic now has a separate fare class for it's more leg-room Comfort Plus-like seats called "Economy Delight". These seats are not the same as their Premium Economy seats which are in a separate cabin and also sold as a separate fare class. Goggle Flights and other third party booking sites do not yet provide a mechanism for selecting these fares as selecting Premium Economy will only show their PE fares.