Great find, this is particularly valuable for Hawaii and Mexico, where tickets can get pretty cheap on a cents per mile basis. Debatable for cheap transcons, but would bump your upgrade chances by having paid fare basis.

I am having a hard time finding the option to use the Pay with Miles. Do you have to have the Delta AmEx card registered on your account? Or is there something I am missing while trying to pay.

This will work great for me because I want to book 2 flights that are $260 each. Straight awards would be 40,000 each = 80,000. Or I can use this method using 50,000 miles and pay the $20 extra. Save 30,000 by spending $20 - great deal. And like someone said above, earning RDM's and MQM's as a revenue ticket.

Thanks for any help.

You should have your Delta Amex linked to your skymiles account.

Okay, I didn't do that yet. Will try that first. Thanks!

Thanks, OP. Interesting deal. I just received this card a few weeks ago. Dumb question, but what do you do to link it to your Skymiles account? I assume providing your Skymiles number when applying wasn't enough?

That is exactly what I am finding. I can convert to ecert and get the award flights I want for less miles than the award.

How lame is that!

I haven't done this yet. I just saw the T&Cs and thought people could benefit.

So I was planning on using my dad's Delta AmEx for this deal - but turns out he cancelled his Delta AmEx last year. Because I thought he still had it - I passed on the recent 45,000 bonus points offer - what a dope!

Now my choice is settle for the 25,000 offer if I want to use this trick - or just wait it out until a better one comes along. I'm guessing that 45,000 offer won't be happening again anytime soon.

Maybe I could find out if any of my friends have this card...

I got a targetted one for 15,000 MQMs and 40K RDMs in December. I know there are better offers out there. Depends on if you want to be patient.

I could see the potential for doing this, although, I primarily use miles for upgrades, which, IME yields a better than 1cpm redemption rate.

One question. Some refundable tickets supposedly have fees associated with changes. I did a dummy booking and, while it said "refundable" there was also a note about potential fees. I went to the fare rules and all I was able to see was a $100 fee for a "lost ticket".

Can some of our more seasoned FTers offer any insight into this? It would certainly be a big disappointment to do this and find out there are additional fees which would lessen the value of the credit.

If I ever do decide to use this option, I would like to avoid that scenario.

Thanks!

I saw the same thing. Even though it says "Refundable" it still says that some fees may apply. But I have not tried it out - although I would imagine it says that just in case - but doesn't really charge you any fees if you buy a refundable ticket.

Tried yet?
 

Has anyone tried this yet? I wanted to confirm actual success in doing this.

I'm kind of interested in this too. Would this work if say I booked a non-refundable fare combination pay with miles and credit card, then kill the reservation within the 24 hour window, since we do have the option of canceling a reservation within that window with no penalty and a full refund?

Edit: Never mind. I went back to the first page and read about the Risk Free Cancellation policy, where that's the except that the miles will get redeposited. I guess I would have to like for a refundable fare to get this to work.

how can existing card holders do this? We need a step by step ;)

Worked for us.

Booked an M class ticket using 50k skymiles + a little cash. Suggest taking a screen shot as you book. The itinerary clearly indicated that it was a refundable fare in the screen shot.

Tried canceling/requesting refund online several times but it never worked so I had my wife call in to the medallion line since this was under her name (my miles as a PM are more valuable to us than hers as a FO so we used hers). First rep said that it couldn't be refunded. Odd.

I think, but am not sure, that the fare class on a pay-with-miles itinerary changed from M to something else. I don't have the reservation any more so can't confirm it. This may be why the rep said it couldn't be refunded.

After I showed my wife the PDF that indicated it was refundable, she called back and the second rep said it was refundable (w/o having to make any fuss). They did mess up by converting the entire fare into an eCert rather than refunding the cash portion to my credit card. We book enough that it makes little difference to me though.

Good hint. I hate the conversion rate but I'm trying to put my wife on some revenue tickets (possibly hitting GM this year) instead of all awards and this is useful. Thanks to the OP!

Would the Delta Amx option work for this conversion thing? Thanks!