Jaimito Cartero

I was bored late last night, and hadn't spoken with any DL phone folks for a few months, so figured I'd give a call in, and look for a Asia-US RT ticket for next year.

I had actually hoped to get Chisholm, but no luck. Now that I'm a lowly silver, I guess I have to go through what a lot of other folks get when they call in for an award. 40 minutes on hold before I got someone in Dallas.

Explained what I wanted, very flexible on dates, only wanted biz, and at low level. The agent was actually quite good, patient, and seemed to mostly be up on her ticketing.

At one point she did tell me that she couldn't book an AS domestic segment on the award if there were no DL segments. I've booked a handful in the last few years where I never had a DL flight, so this confused me a bit. I told her to recheck.

I was only hold for long periods while the agent got in touch with KE and AS. In the end, I managed to get the departure date within 1 day of what I wanted, and the return within 1 week. I did have to settle for the domestic legs in Y on both Skywest and AS. In the past, I've always been able to find AS F seats without much problem. Since some dates were almost 330 days out, I was a bit puzzled about the lack of domestic F with AS.

In the end, I reduced my DL mile stash by almost 25%. Finally under 400k total. Under $50 in taxes, plus the $25 phone ticketing fee (boooo!).

And I even have a seat on the KE whale, so hopefully nothing happens to that service in the next 10 months. Total time on the phone, on hold and ticketing was 2 hours 28 minutes. Even booking RTW awards, I never spent that much on the phone.

DLATL777

Thats a pretty good one; The most time I have ever spent on the phone with a DL agent (thus far) is 2 hours 15 minutes on two back-to-back calls building my LHR-DEL-KTM-BOM DEL-LHR 9W/IT Business Class award.

davetravels

Booked yesterday:

PIT/JFK/LHR July 4 Good short layover - Low Y

LCY/ORY July 7

CDG/PIT Non-stop July 11 Low Y

60K Total! Yay!!

A couple of thingz . . . .

The agent had a few problems making it work - but she kept telling me - "I'm gonna MAKE IT WORK"!!! And she did!! Part of the problem was changing airports between LHR & LCY and ORY & CDG. Another part was JFK/LHR was showing Mid Level Y - but when you clicked on it - it dropped to LOW Y - - - you guyz know what I'm talking about! But she pulled it all together!

One more slight bonus was, that I had a very old award ticket to CDG & TXL that I wasn't going to use at 80K (one way Low Y and one way Low J), so I actually got 20K miles BACK!! $24 extra in taxes, though!

johnslloyd

I took my meager 110,000 SkyPiles, accumulated over a couple years in various and asundry ways (less than half of them BIS miles) and converted them to 10 x $100 AmEx gift cards at 11,000 miles per. After half a dozen deliberate but failed attempts, I never could get 2x low-Y SkyPiles Hawaii tickets on dates I wanted to go, and devaluation just keeps eating them up.

Southwest will be flying to Hawaii and Alaska in a year's time and I have and will have Southwest RR points aplenty for that. In the meantime, I scored 5x $334 R/T LAS-HNL on Hawaiian for the family in October.

If this seems off-topic, it's not. I consider trading 110,000 SkyPiles for $1000 in AmEx gift cards as a bona-fide success. Redemption-wise, SkyPiles seems to me to be the worst FF program on the planet.

mlad1101

Assuming your HNL flights are on DL you could have used pay with miles which gives you 1cpm, whereas you got .9cpm with the GC's. That's just talking straight numbers, that being said the MQM you earn booking the tickets from GC's may make up the extra $100 you could have gotten to, depending how you value them.

atlantacane75

Booked late last week:

ATL-CDG-BOM 3/16
BOM-CDG-ATL 4/2

Air France Business Class

120K a ticket. Super stoked.

RustyC

I went through my annual exercise of trying to book a summer trip to SE Asia and noticed that the only direct routings with seats (at the new 80K mile level ) from ATL to BKK were ones with the DTW/LAX-HND segment "connecting" to NRT-BKK (or vice-versa), often with overnight layovers.

The DL website wasn't doing a good job of flagging this (at least for awards....dunno about paid tickets). Would not be surprised if people miss that little detail and get a rude awakening after having ticketed. Not only is there the train trip, but I'd assume you have to run everything through Japanese customs.

Anyway, this year's exercise to get a lowest-tier award, ATL-BKK from mid-June to mid-July, was an intense six-hour marathon of querying piece by piece in hopes of cobbling something together. There were tons of dead ends, but the final booking (multi-city, search-by-schedule, pieced together) was:


ATL-MSP (23-hour stop)-SEA-NRT-BKK and
BKK-NRT-PDX (3-day stopover)-SLC (red eye)-ATL

The layovers/stopovers proved critical in getting around what was otherwise a brick wall of non-availability at saver ("green") level. It was all waaaayyyyy too much work for any individual with much of a life outside of doing things like this.

catharsis

Just an update and thankyou

Thanks to the information available from FT (and milepoint.com, in fairness) I was able to book OW flights from AKL-PPT-LAX-NYC-CDG in J for 125K each.

the tricky part was getting from LAX to NYC, but apart from that everything was booked on ST carriers and hence there was no real difficulty finding availability.

I did need to create a FlyingBlue Airfrance account to be able to check AF/KL and some other ST partners availability. I also used the very useful tools at wanderingaramean.com as well as expertflyer (which is worth every penny!)

I created an itinerary which included LAX-SLC-EWR in First at LOW and then waited.... sure enough the flights were eventually rescheduled and I was able to change for free onto a J class fare direct LAX-JFK.

I would just like to thank those who contributed freely of their time and expertise here for helping to make my wedding/honeymoon dreams a reality. I would also like to say to those on the site to keep the faith. 125K miles for over halfway round the world in J is not too bad :-)

mpattdu

Thanks to reading this forum and a fantastic DL agent I was able to book the itinerary I wanted (with almost perfect dates) for 2 passengers in (mostly) biz for 100k miles each. It took three call before I struck gold with the last agent.

ORD-CDG - stopover
CDG-BCN-PMI
PMI-MAD-CDG-DTW-MSN

The BCN-PMI and PMI-MAD legs were only available are in coach, but worth it to make everything work. Should be a great anniversary trip this summer!

BHB

My most (relatively) pain-free booking experience yet

We had zero flexibility with dates, unfortunately, as we're working around school vacation/spring break next year.

I was able to find and book _5_ seats on the following itin:

March 31: JFK-CDG-VCE (AF J on the 772 for the longhaul segment)

April 10: VCE-JFK (DL Y+ on the 763)

Total outlay per person: 80k miles + $75 in taxes and fees.

Not the best redemption in the world, but with zero flexibility as to dates, I was happy to find five seats at this price/miles rate. If J opens up on the DL return flight, I may look to upgrade to J, though frankly as it is a daylight flight and we're already booked in Y+, I may just keep the miles.

I wanted the 388 for the outbound, just for the experience of flying on a new type (and yes, I've read the negative reviews about the experience) but couldn't find a flight with more than 4 seats.

This took me about 20 minutes on expertflyer (for the AF availability and dl.com (for the DL return). The Chisolm call center was extremely helpful in getting everything booked and ticketed.

BHB

That's quite a trip, I'm glad it worked out!

MegatopLover

LAX-ICN-BKK on KE A380 and 777-300 in Prestige (Business) Class for 120k miles. Had to spoon-feed the routing to the agents. Booked outbound first, around 328-day mark, and the return at around 325 days. This is for Thai New Year in April 2012. $63 in taxes-- much better than the taxes and fuel surcharges passed through for MH and MU.

zhlobsky

Two separate award tickets confirmed today on very short notice (for travel on 6/4 and 6/7):

1. MIA-ATL-BOS-CDG-FCO-CDG (stopover)-MIA. U.S. domestic flights in DL F-class, and transatlantic and intra-European flights in AF J-Class. Total: 100K miles, plus $202 in taxes.

2. MIA-JFK-FCO-CDG (stopover)-MIA. U.S. domestic flights in DL F-class, and transatlantic and intra-European flights in AF J-Class (except JFK-FCO, which is in AZ J-class, though connections in AF J-class were also available via CDG from a few AF N. American gateways). Total: 100K miles, plus $167 in taxes.

Did approx. 60 minutes of preliminary research on EF and KVS and then, like others, had to baby-feed every single flight segment for each ticket to DL PM agent, who expressed great surprise that I had found anything to Europe at this late time at all.

Just for kicks, also checked TATL availability on DL metal. Not surprisingly, only the highest mileage redemption level available for J-class, even for connections through slightly less traveled cities like DUB, CPH and ARN--this notwithstanding the fact that most flights I checked appeared to be wide open for revenue seats in J. When you can fly AF's lovely transatlantic J-class product, who needs BizElite anyway?

hardfour

Dec 22 to Jan 2: IAD-CDG-TXL and TXL-CDG-IAD on AF Business class. 100k miles + $210 each.

This is the first time I've been able to book an award flight on Delta with anything approaching a decent value.

It actually wasn't too hard to find using the Delta.dumb search engine. I tried to book on Delta metal through JFK. Was able to find the JKF-TXL leg without a problem, but when I added the WAS-JFK segment, the miles required went through the roof. Those December flights from WAS to JFK must be in very high demand 6+ months out....

Anyway, thrilled that I was able to finally put my SkyPesos to good use.

bonnie00

Thanks to the posts on this thread and using both Expert Flyer and KVSTool, i was able to travel business class on AF from MIA - BLR , outbound
FLL-JFK-CDG-BLR
BLR-CDG-MIA
for 120K miles with only the FLL-JFK in coach

the most difficult to get was the Business Class from FLL-JFK. Delta does make the First Class unavailable on domestic flights at the low price, so one ends flying economy.

Thanks all for your help

Some availability can be found only KVStool and not on Expertflyer.

It took a little bit of learning and was a process but well worth it.

Thanks everyone.