I view DL as an airline with a great product, and their elite program is competitive (although I wish they wouldn't focus so heavily on selling all the upgrades out from under us....), but unfortunately good SkyMiles redemptions can be few and far in between. If you get one, grab it (and take 2)!

United wll get you to Europe for low miles and no fuel surcharges just about every day of the year including last minute. DL punishes you for using your miles last minute.

BIG DELTA SCAM!! No booking fee. United charges $75 for non elites less than 21 days out. DL charges nothing. Instead they just charge TRIPLE the miles or more. Ive even seen 280,000 miles one way for business class to Europe when on the same day United is 57,500-70,000 or 110,000 for Lufthansa First. I think id rather pay $75 than 200,000 miles.

Delta Skymiles takes all the fun out of planning a last minute mileage trip.
@Mark P24 - Elite program SUCKS. I cannot even get a free Comfort+ seat as a Diamond anymore. It goes to the upgrade list and its very difficult to get a +1. DL also does not have any hot food for purchase on 6 hour cross country flights like UA has. I also like booking last minute miles trips. So it would take $28,000 in spend on DL airlines.. thats 2 years of being a Diamond just to get a free one way business class ticket last minute from JFK-Europe. No thanks!

:confused:

That's not how accounting works. More SkyMiles outstanding=bigger liability on the books.

They want you to redeem at the law value rates and thus take the liability off their books.

The way DL handles C+ is weaker than AA, I'll agree with that. The elites get to pick their extra legroom seats at booking time all the way down to Plat (equivalent of Gold medallion). I can tell you though that AA is stingy with their business class awards though (which is what I shop). You say you like last minute awards, but on AA they don't show up as savers, so the recent TPAC I took (LAX-PVG) would have been 140k one way. I managed a saver by booking 7 or 8 months in advance for 70k which was an amazing redemption but as an FT reader I felt like it might have been a bit of a unicorn.

I'm pretty sure what Aero means, is that it's a 'scam' for the variable award chart to charge awards comparably to market rates for last minute trips. AA and UA with award charts will still have cheap seats at the expense of only $75 booking fees. And honestly that last-minute thing can be a big saver. When my grandmother died just before Christmas, I used AA points to go to the funeral for 42,500, and if I could have waited a few more days to return (I flew home on Christmas Day) it would have been 25k round trip. Even what I paid was much nicer than the $750 economy fare.

Well, they can if there is more demand for them. The laws of supply and demand work, regardless of whether the currency is cash or miles. And they aren't being punitive per se; they are doing whatever they can to maximize their profits and decrease the liability of miles on their books.

And I'm not trying to be a Delta apologist, I just see economics for what it is....supply and demand.


It benefits them by people opting to pay with cash if they don't feel like they're getting a deal using miles, and it benefits them by getting a big chunk of miles off the liability column if customers do buy high mileage tickets.

I think that you are missing the basic principles of accounting.

What DL is doing is rapidly decreasing the dollar value of a SkyMile.

So if DL has 1 billion SM on the books at $0.005 and then 2 billion on the books at $0.0002, why the SkyMile liability is greater, the real, dollar-value, liability is less. That is the whole point point here, that most clearly see but you seem to somehow miss.

United may be awesome in terms of low level award redemption out of The Big City, but if your starting region is only served by United Express, the vast majority of the time a lack of saver inventory on that first Barbie Jet hop to Houston (or Denver or Newark) makes the entire award ticket price out stupidly expensive, even when the transatlantic or transpacific leg has wide open low level award availability.

I have managed to find needed United award flights where 12.5K + $75 one way was a screaming bargain compared to other options. And last winter also got me a RT 27K Delta domestic award booked three days before departure on another family matter. Sometimes the deals or reasonable prices do still work out.

I've also got a stash of Alaska miles I'd like to use on American but run into similar Eagle bottlenecks in terms of first hop saver availability. And my experience with American has been, to borrow a phrase from my husband, 'hoopty planes'.

At least with Delta, the product itself is better and since Podunk Field (and the airports to either side within reasonable driving distance) has mainline service rather than Barbie Jets I get better award inventory for the first hop scenario. (I'm reluctant to go the paid positioning flight route because legacy service around here is expensive for paid tickets and the ULCCs are too unreliable for my taste)

It's too bad that it's not possible* to file a class action suit over bait and switch like what DL is pulling.

*Of course its possible but I'd be surprised if DL didn't have language in their boilerplate that protects them from continuous devaluations.

Indeed, that is extremely unlikely. DL has had their pax bend over and take more, more and still MORE. By and large, practically everyone has done so quietly without the slightest resistance, without ever saying "enough is enough". Look at the removal of award chart as of late. The countless stealth devaluations preceding that surely gave DL the confidence to do that bigger move (the pax were already numbed and beaten up so much). Now there is nothing stopping DL to go to segment-by-segment pricing (like VS is doing now, using the DL back-end reservations systems - is that a trial of how DL plans to do its own awards in the near future? I sure think so) and to essentially a cash-rebate program for SM, where 1 SM = $0.01 (or even less). Well, the SkyTeam agreements is the only wrinkle in the plan, so hopefully the alliance as a whole keeps blocking this.

Doesn't Delta have a stake in Aeromexico, AF, KLM, and Alitalia? Are the remaining airlines strong enough and interested enough in blocking such a change? I just saw a post on TPG about a flight to Hawaii that's 55k-100k with Skymiles and 39k on Virgin Atlantic (which isn't even Skyteam I guess). So even if Skymiles become an official cash-rebate like Southwest, I'm not sure the others have to follow.

Upvote. Plus you get a boatload of MQMs the easy way, a single long flight.

I disagree. Supply and demand doesn't work in a monopoly. Monopolies make decisions about what quantity to supply, but a monopoly does not have a supply curve.

Do you have inside knowledge of how DL is valuing its outstanding miles, or is that just your theory? Because I would be extremely skeptical their accountants would allow them to materially decrease a current liability on a regular, ongoing basis by unilaterally lowering the value they assign to each outstanding mile.

Without JV, airlines cannot share pricing data, so they can't really follow. That is the good thing for us (pax).

That is why alliance/partner awards (unless there is JV, then it may be dynamic) are set using a fair and transparent (in theory, though now it is unpublished) award chart, and are either available or not, but the price doesn't vary. So is the case in ST, OW and *A. However, DL may try to do what VS is already doing (using DL res systems, back end and front end that also looks pretty much identical to the DL site now), what BA and others do, and go to segment-by-segment vs zone to zone pricing. That is the most DL can get away with under the current regulatory environment. That still would be a pretty big devaluation, but not quite as bad as 1 SM per $0.01 outright. Though on a second though, it can be worse, if the award levels are made, say, 50,000 miles for a $150~$200 normal price flight, as is often already the case, with many awards being barely worth $0.005, as the (unpublished) chart has been so badly inflated. I mean most outside of US awards, like inter-Asia, are now pretty pointless, as you get less than 1cpm.