Marylou

hfly

Gooselee, and just before that the floor was 90k, and a few years before that 80k.................and considering that hardly anyone ever finds avails at 128k, no it is not remarkable............some would call it something else entirely!

sdadept

we caught a flash sale for I believe 98k miles slc-lon that we used in may. I think we booked it the previous oct or dec. Best BC sale in miles I've ever seen.

TheMadBrewer

My brother got MCO-ATL-FRA/FRA-ATL in D1 this August for 98K. He used to fly a lot on DL maybe 15 years ago and asked me "is this a good price, seems high" I told him jump on it (he is stopping over in ATL for DragonCon)

I was able to get LAX-ATL-FRA-ATL-LAX around the same dates for 128K. But to get the same dates would have been 400+K because there was no FC space on LAX-ATL the day I wanted. So I did ATL-FRA-ATL-LAX for 128K on my preferred dates and bought a cheap LAX-ATL ticket in Y.

We booked these in early May.

Last year I bought a $3200 D1 ticket and used 100K miles to knock a grand off. Since I don't need to make 125K MQM anymore I am very happy with this deal.

gooselee

Gosh, my apologies. I completely forgot that reminiscing about the good ol' days of 8-10+ years ago and a completely different era of airline FFPs was more relevant to this conversation than describing what is currently the reality. And certainly the various reports of people actually booking TATL J awards at 98/116/128k within the past year are strong evidence of hardly anyone ever finding them available.

If OP found TATL, business class flights that work for him/her for 128k RT per person, OP should book them now.

If others would like to wait around to see if DL magically decides to reverse a decade of program changes and inflation to release large volumes of 80k awards, they have every right to do so. Personally I don't think that's the better strategy than just taking the 128k flight currently being offered, right now, in today's reality.

hfly

No gooselee, YOU are the one who brought A previous award chart at ONE period in time, and YOU seemed to have thought that what we now have is a WONDERFUL deal. Previous to you writing what you wrote, no one on this thread was reminiscing about the old days. All I did was comment that what you thought made this a wonderful deal, is in fact not really so. Did I say that I or anyone else on the entire planet is waiting for 80k to come back? No, I did not, and you saying such a thing is simply a canard, to cover, the wrong statement/judgement that you made.

I mean if you really want to go back down memory lane and see how poor this all is...............If we go back to when it was 80k, that was it, there was no high or low. When it went to 90k, 90k was the lowest, and 150k or so was the highest,again, that was it. Then it went to 125k, and you actually had a very good chance of getting that level half the time, It graduated up to 250k, but, that was it. Now there is a floor of 128k, which hardly anyone can ever get, in order to get it you need to book 60 days in advance (something that none of the previous versions had, and people have reported rates up to 600k or so. Oh, yeah, if your travel starts in Europe you can also be looking at $400-500 per ticket. So no, I do not think that its "only" a 3k change in price, if you believe that, you have bought hook line and sinker into what Delta has been selling these past few years.............

gooselee

Well my response was the second one on the thread (and IIRC I was typing it at the same time as the first response), so yeah, I guess my fault for anticipating that we'd get the usual "Things were so much better before" responses and trying to get ahead of them. If your argument is that this is not a good deal because you could get a similar itinerary for fewer miles 2 or 5 or 10 years ago; I would suggest that that is not a valid argument because last time I checked, my calendar said it is 2019.

Today, right now, in June 2019, 128k for a roundtrip, transatlantic trip in business using DL miles is a good deal and OP should buy the ticket he/she has found.

I added the comment about the 3k increase (and how long ago it occurred) because my guess is OP doesn't care what was a good deal 5 or 10 years ago and may get distracted by all the other repetitive devaluation threads/posts that litter this forum with information that is no longer current or relevant. OP wants to know if they are getting a good deal right now. This is a good deal right now.

I'd also ask that you stop putting words in my mouth as I never said this was a "wonderful" or "remarkable" deal - you seem to have read into that. I have said that 128k is a good deal in the context of OP, that it was one of the lowest prices OP would find currently, and that I didn't believe this particular award had significantly lost value since award charts went away. I still stand by all three of those statements. If you've got 128k DL miles right now, this is probably one of the better ways to spend them.

hfly

No, you said, " This is actually one place where DL miles have not lost an immense amount of value" which is just WRONG. It's 3k miles plus a 60 day advanced purchase, not to mention that 125k only existed seemingly for a few minutes........

So it is actually 38k PLUS
A sixty day advance purchase AND
Rarely available, I would posit maybe 3% of the time, while the 125k was available half the time, AND
If you are buying tickets in the other direction, the fees etc have multiplied by a factor of 3 - 7x.....

So I would say that they have in fact lost a great amount of value, and that value is far greater than................3k.

Again, you are the one who brought this up!

gooselee

Ok.