fti

I checked online for a multi-city award ticket (actually a round trip with a stop on the return) and delta.com gave me an absurd number of miles for the ticket.

So I called DL and the nice woman immediately mentioned that it would cost $20 and that she could look only at up to 3 flights. After that she would have to refer me to the internet.

Come on Delta. If I am paying you $20, I want service, not some of your cr@ppy excuses. If it takes you 10 minutes to find suitable flights, whether it be 3 or 10 flights, that is still $60/hour you are making off of me (not to mention the fact that you already earned a hefty sum from AmEx when you sold AmEx the miles).

To add insult to injury, I asked for a specific airline (AS), she gave me an option with NW/AS, then when I asked her to look at the AS option, she said that she had reached her limit. And not only that, the required mileage on her initial itinerary was 45K but when I asked her to change one flight from F to Y, she said it wouldn't make a difference - but when she made the change voila, it saved 10K miles.

But since she couldn't look any further ("3 flights"), I just hung up and called back. What a waste of their time and mine - now a new phone call, start all over again.

El Boocho

Did you get the name of the "nice woman" and then ask to be transferred to a supervisor to lodge a complaint about the silly rule? Or did you just come here and complain about it.

MemphisQueen

yeah seems odd since th eonly way to do a RTW award ticket is to call and that's 7 segments. def seems like she didn't know what was going on.

redtailshark

It defies both common sense and good business practice as to why they do this.

The BS of charging for phone calls, to redeem in ways that are advertised as part of the SM program - i.e. involving airlines called "partners," a feature touted in all SM publicity - is another bait and switch tactic. Especially when you're told during the call that the agent either doesn't have the authority to check more than three times, or simply won't do it - because he/she is being held accountable to a metric of number of customers processed per day/week.

This is the kind of thing that just needs to be fixed. No excuses about "it can't be done, it's OK etc." It's not, and other airlines don't give us this. No, even US air!

fti

Hmm. So no one has ever posted complaints on FT. Would you really ask such an unhelpful person for her supervisor? Having done so in the past (not with DL), you often unexpectedly and accidentally get "disconnected." Yeah, right.

And interesting that you of all people make this suggestion. One of several "complaint" threads that you started:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...al-baling.html

DLgrl

The official rule is check 3 sets of dates. Some people call in and say "I want to go somewhere in Europe between April and August and I want it for 60k miles". That of course is not what you were doing, but some people do. The agent you spoke with was apparently confused by this rule. If you get a good agent, that rule usually isn't even mentioned and you can get what you want it one call.

MikeMpls

Yet another step down from the good service we used to have. Especially if this is the much vaunted SMS, we've been rooked again.

fti

Without DL status, I called the general line so it was not the SMS service. But I did ask for "international" even though it was domestic (an old habit from when domestic flight requests got routed to India).

El Boocho

Yes I wrote a letter and received a response. What did you do?

Of course arguing with the CSA or being confrontational with an FA or GA, get you nowhere. You said she was nice, so it seems reasonable that she would have transferred you to someone whom you could give an earful about the bad policy. Which I agree is bad, regardless if it is 3 flights or 3 dates.

My thread was very different. I was asking if others had seen a similar decline. I wasn't just crying about it.

PM me if you would like the elite phone number. I'd be happy to give it to you.

El Boocho

My understanding is that International doesn't exist as a separate desk anymore. All agents are now trained to do international as well. I'm not sure about international partner airline desk though.

Why not redeem through NW? I though availability was better there?

redtailshark

First, thanks for letting us know about the "official rule."

This is disturbing on several levels.

To begin with, I don't see what would be wrong with the question posed above. If the website isn't trusted, because people suspect it's being tuned to actively limit saver-level award availability, then why wouldn't customers want that level of assistance? It's an indictment of online functionality.

The lack of functionality of the website basically wastes our time and the CSRs. It leads to angry customers who suspect they're being fed bait and switch. There's no acceptable justification for operating a FF program in this way.

We didn't hear this kind of thing from the NWA PE line. No indeed, they told us things like: "I like a challenge...tell me what you need." And they delivered. If it was available systemwide, they'd find it for us and book it if we liked it. They worked within availability parameters established by the WP program, but they did so as OUR ALLIES, and not as an additional tier of [email protected] with the purpose of limiting our use of the promised benefits.

Compared that to the level of CS being enforced by DL. Under the system you describe, even if an agent wants to be helpful and overcome the notorious shortcomings of the DL.COM award booking tool, s/he will be held accountable to this metric.

If redemptions are going to be treated as an "at-will favor", which is DL management logic, then you'll find that potentially good customers will treat their DL paid itins as an "at-will favor" too.

buckwirth

QUOTE=redtailshark:

"First, thanks for letting us know about the "official rule."

This is disturbing on several levels...

We didn't hear this kind of thing from the NWA PE line..."

OP was not using the Plat line. He called on the regular line.

Ultimately, this is probably just another example of why status with an airline matters.

raehl311

Indeed, one customer-unfriendly agent on the general phone line is hardly an indicative sample size. Could just be a bad apple or a good apple on a bad day.

Jaimito Cartero

Ah, I love the smell of a beancounter, first thing in the morning!

jayenoh

Last time I called in for help with an award ticket, the agent was giving me the same results I had seen online, so I asked him about it. He told me he was using the Delta website