Using DL Skymiles on Skyteam
 

I have considerable mileage in DL Skymiles. How can I use them for flights on other Skyteam members, in particularly Korean, NWA or Continental.
Thanks

Call Delta?

check nwa.com and continental.com for availability and then call Delta. And welcome to FT.

See? He is very helpful will have info for you. You will check on Delta, Continental or Northwest will take on any the flights to check availability for skyteam partner.

I had a similar experience with in January.
I wanted to use my Continental onepass miles (Over 200K) for Korean Air between Inchon & JFK.
To make a long story short, I am disappointed with Skyteam service.


When I called Continental onepass reservation desk,
they confirmed that no reward seats were available with Korean Air KE086.
When I called Korean Air reservation desk,
they confirmed that plenty of rewards seats are available for Korean Air
Skypass members.
Representative at Korea Air told me that they prioritize Korean Air Skypss rewards and allocate leftovers to Skyteam partners.
I finally booked Korean Air ticket with using my Korean Air Skypass miles.


This means I may not use Continnetal over 200K miles with Korean Air Skyteam partner. As long as each Skyteam members prioritize their own
memebrs... This sucks for me... How can I use over 200K Continental miles??

So your problem is actually with Korean Air and their method of allocation, not CO or ST.

If you want to use CO miles, you could always try flying a CO route (NRT-?) or do a CO-Mike route.

??? Delta is a pain to check for award flights, CO and NW have decent award availability search engines, which include partner airlines (KE reportedly is problematic recently).

It's easy to research this!
 

Here's a readily accepted way to accomplish what you need. Do it this way and you can avoid calling Delta Intl awards until you are ready to book the exact award flights that work for you.

First, go here and read this thread: award ticket buckets on Skyteam airlines for F+ . Read. There you will find all the award codes for Skyteam airlines. For example, for Air France it is A for first and O for bizclass, and for CO it is E for first and G for economy.

Once you know the award bucket codes you want, then go here:
Class Availability Website and enter your destination, dates and the airlines you want. That will bring up results with all the bucket codes available for those airlines for those flights. Use multiple airlines at once... you can outbound on CO for one leg and another Skyteam for a second leg, for example.

Don't see an award code (i.e. like A2 for AF means 2 award seats available) then change the outbound or inbound date and re-search. You are lucky they are Delta miles, because you can use 100k DL miles to book first class on other Skyteam members, but CO miles can only book biz with their 100k miles... go figure... :D

Once you find the seats, immediately call Delta Inlt Awards at 1-800-323-2323 and tell them what you want and they will love you for making it so easy for them. I have used this method 3 times in the past year to painlessly book/re-book two A seats on AF from IAH to CDG.

Good luck... and welcome to FT! ^

DallasBill-If I understand your first link then a coach award on DL is in N class. I did not see that code when I plugged in a sample R/T flight on your 2nd link. What am I doing wrong?

What DallasBill is suggesting is the elaborate way of researching award availability. Just make sure that the booking class is available throughout the entire journey. Even if every single flight has that booking class available, the combination might not. The reward availability calendar of continental is not bad (at least for CO and NW), you can see the availability for an entire month.

Yes... correct. But it can be that booking class, or a lower booking class, if you are booking a First or a bizclass seat.

So, loomis, DL codes are N/O/R for economy/biz/exec. AF are X/O/A for economy/biz/first. Say you have 100k points and you want to go to IAH-CDG-FLR. Enter IAH for the depart and FLR for the destination. Select DL, CO and AF for the airlines.

Now, for outbound, what gives you First (A) on IAH-CDG if that is most important and what other airlines on the outbound leg have availability in that level or lower. Do the same for the return.

When I booked, I knew I wanted to only use CO and CDG because I didn't want to fly thru Atlanta. I knew that AF out of Houston had a higher availability of A seats than it did out of any other city, generally. So, I fly economy to Houston on CO, First on AF to Paris and biz on AF to Florence. On the return it's economy on AF to Paris, First on AF to Houston and biz on CO back to DFW.

I hope that makes some sense.

I am not sure what to make of this point. If every single flight going both ways for what he searched for shows seats in (let's say) A, O, N, and he is booking with 100k points, then he can easily get there and back again and he can pick which airline and flight he wants.

How come none of these award buckets show up when I search flyaow.com?

yeah, search CDG-DTW on AF and find O0, then do FRA-CDG-DTW and find O1 (also works the other way, crazy stuff, not only on AF). So just checking individual segments can be misleading! Same thing goes with revenue booking classes. Just looked into booking BOS-MSP-SEA, BOS-MSP: K9; MSP-SEA: K9; BOS-SEA: K0!

certain airlines will only display award buckets if there are seats available.

I was under the impression that only sites such as ExpertFlyer gave you these buckets.