Unreasonable award pricing for Europe <90 days out
 

I know there are countless threads about the fact that TATL award fares have gone way up over the last few years. But what I'm seeing now just seems unreasonable. I'm researching a trip to Europe this winter and I'm seeing one way rates of 105,000 miles no matter what dates or destination (within Europe) I choose over the next 90 days. It seems to me that they have a 90-day advanced purchase restriction for any lower level award tickets, because decent award fares suddenly come back exactly 90 days out. In comparison, both United and American have the exact same routes for 30k miles one way with ample low level availability.

105k one-way for economy? That's absurd.

LBJ has posted extensively on the topic. Partner awards can be one mechanism to avoid the advance purchase rules for lower priced award redemptions.

If you like AA and UA award availability, accrue their miles. That's how the market is supposed to work.

There have been several discussions here on this topic. There are a number of RT awards for less miles that do not have a 90-day advance purchase requirement. You won't see these when doing one-way searches. Advance purchase requirements for each award level can be found by clicking on the "Fare Rules" link for the award.

There are reduced rate coach awards to Europe out of BOS and JFK if you are based out of there or can reposition (can potentially use hidden city on return if based in another hub). The below roundtrip awards have 30-day AP and Sat night stay requirement. In some cases, there are additional levels with lower AP requirements. Here's a few I found.

BOS-LHR 32K RT
BOS-AMS 34K RT
BOS-FRA 38K RT
BOS-DUB 38K RT
BOS-CDG 38K RT
BOS-AGP 40K RT
BOS-FCO 42K RT
JFK-LHR 32K RT
JFK-FRA 32K RT
JFK-MAD 32K RT
JFK-ALC 36K RT
JFK-DUB 46K RT
JFK-BCN 46K RT

Yes, for economy.

My point of mentioning that UA and AA have plenty of low level availability is to indicate that Delta's high award fares can't be justified by peak demand. The advance purchase restrictions are purely punitive.

I'm seeing RT fares that are less than the $105k OW, but the problem is that I'm continuing on from Europe to another destination. You can't redeposit miles if you cancel the return leg of a RT award fare more than 72 hours before the flight can you?

I'm not so sure that I'd say there's "plenty" of AA availability, and the YQ on their TATL tickets are usually hundreds of dollars each way. I'm not saying that 30k+$300 is competitive to $100k though.

I noticed something else doing a test search. I found r/t were 104k (AA would be 60k), so this is more to do with how one-way cash TATL fares cost almost or as much as round trip TATL when leaving the USA. Can you book a round trip with a distant return date and then possibly just do a change of date later?

Edit: Oh, you saw this too. What about a multi-city award?

In this case there was no YQ for the AA award... only the $5.60 TSA fee.

I did find a 29,000 mile award in Y with Flying Blue miles. Opted to do J instead for 62,500 miles + YQ on AF's Dreamliner. I haven't flown the 787 yet and want to give it a try.

I noticed this too. Pretty ridiculous for delta.
105k 1 way europe.
58k roundtrip europe.....with about 30% availability though.

58k is about the normal price.

Delta has intentionally removed most of the flexibility that mile fares used to have. The only remanent of the old days of yore is free refunds for PM and DM. Delta is trying to slowly boil the frog and get 1 SkyMile = 1 cent of fares. This is why they "ban" one ways: one way TATL fares are expensive (for some reason or another). Over time Delta will continue to add more and more restrictions to better match actual fare prices until - for all intents and purposes - they're the same.

Delta has made it clear that they are not interested in making SkyMiles a competitive part of their loyalty program. It is what it is.

Mixing one-way awards (with different programs) was one of the ways to make use of scant award availability. It's a shame DL is taking that option away (through skyrocketing OW award rates), and I don't really understand why this benefits DL.

This benefits DL by having more and more pax accumulate more and more SlyMiles, that will be worth less and less in the future. Essentially, it's hyper-inflation on the actual redeemable value of the DL SM liability, which means that the liability for DL goes down.

Raising award levels or restricting availability in general does that. But why target OW awards?

Europe - USA return fares range in the EUR 300-500 range, esp. during winter and with 90 day before.
Why would anyone waste miles?

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.

No inside knowledge, no. But, that is clearly the intent. And accountants whose "performance bonuses" are tied to decreasing liabilities and making the numbers look better would likely have no problem of doing this (remember a company called Enron that was audited et al? :)), esp. as it is factually accurate and supported by real world data (e.g. average $ value of actual SM redemption, that is obviously plunging down - and fast).

Sorry, I don't agree with you at all. A reputable CPA firm won't let a public company pull that kind of garbage, especially after Enron. Please recall what happened to Arthur Anderson.

In any event, DL doesn't need to play those sorts of balance sheet games. The ongoing devaluation of SkyMiles is not a fraud on the market, though it certainly may be dirty pool from the perspective of those who have acquired large caches of miles (either through flying or credit card spend).

Having advanced purchase restrictions for low level award tickets hurts ALL customers; having a close-in booking fee on award tickets for non-elite customers only hurts non-Elite customers.

Having a flat rate of 105k award fare for ALL one-way TATL flights within 90 days from departure, regardless of destination or date, isn't a demand-based decision.

Exactly, Why else would they get rid of the Award Chart a couple of years ago??
It's all part of the plan.
They are making more money than AA and UL, so... they are going to stick to the plan.
If they never give away another seat for miles, do you think they care?

The outstanding SM will add up, but their value will go down since no one is using them, because of outrageous redemptions.

It's a great plan until they have no loyal customers left. Then it will get interesting. Hero to zero in as fast as you can say GE.

No? then what it it?

I've been flying TATL for more years than most, since they bought Pan Am. You remember that don't you? They flew for years with 20 to 40 people in Economy during the off season, maybe two passengers per row in the last 10 rows.
As soon as that door shut, I find the first empty middle section and I'd have my flat bed 4 or 5 seats across.
What changed this was 9/11.The down turn was so great, they had to do something different. That drove the effort to reduce capacity and they did with a vengeance.

The TATL route has never been so full. NEVER.

So SM award levels are based on the economics of the entire aircraft, not just the half dozen award seats that may or may not be available.

It's why DL is making more money than AA or UL, and they are smart enough to at least get their employees to smile and act like they care, which I think they do.


Why give up a seat for SM? They will sell every seat if no one redeems anything. How many seats do you think they are offering in any case?
The few, just became fewer.

That is the point, though (that you seem to be missing). If DL doesn't revalue the liability on the balance sheet, then it is going to end up inaccurate and artificially high. Just like currency exchange rates fluctuate, so does the the SkyMiles value vs. USD. Why would DL not reflect thee accurate liability of its outstanding SM balance, in USD?

Sadly (for those with a sizable DL SM balance), as independent studies have proven, the airline business is not about loyalty. DL clearly has paid attention and strongly believes in that (and it is, for the most part, very true).

I, for one, am glad to have my FFPs spread fairly evenly in numerous airline and hotel programs, and do my very best to keep using it up as rapidly as possible across the board. Loyalty to any one airline went out the window shortly after DL acquired NW and started the countless devaluations and endless lies.

I agree that loyalty is overrated and doesn't have a big impact. With that said, this is going to eventually impact Delta. Delta is literally making their awards punitive, and it is going to come back to bite them. I am now to the point where I do everything I can not to fly Delta. Will I still spend 25K a year with Delta? Yes, but that is 20K less than I would have spent with them otherwise.

Ironically trying to find TATL business class redemption availability was the last straw for me. The mileage redemption literally prices out at less than 1 cent per mile for TATL fares. I can buy a ticket for $3420, but the mileage redemption is 560K plus $150 or so in fees. It's insulting and creates a negative brand impression for me.

Yes, these redemptions can be pretty extreme. It's certainly very frustrating. While I haven't done it yet, as I've been able to find better value, I always know that as a Delta AMEX cardholder I can pay with miles and get a minimum of 1 cent/ mile, so that is somewhat of a saving grace, although not much.

It's not just TATL. That is so across the board. SkyTeam awards also have been inflated so much (e.g. intra Asia), where 17,500 is the SM cost for a $50 to $90 typical price flight, for example. Whereas UA has went down to 5K, 8K, from 12.5K awards for shorter distance just earlier this year, DL has only kept pushing one way: up, up and up. Literally, the standard (lowest) award price has practically tripled on many routes over the last few years, while cash prices have stayed the same or slightly went down.

Not TATL but in general, I agree that accumulating SkyMiles is plainly not worth it. Not by flying, and certainly not by CC spend. And yes, over the long run it will impact Delta. Sadly, I am afraid that impact will be so small in the greater scheme of things, that it'll be totally lost on DL.