Delta SkyMiles--Far Fewer Flights than If You Using Cash

While I really don’t have any experience with Delta, I can say this is a fairly typical issue for most airline frequent flier programs. In addition, for frequent flier tickets people often look for them as soon as they are available for their routing and date. Often the best flights are snapped up right away. 6 months out you may just be seeing what is left, not necessarily what was originally on offer.

I do hope that you resolve this to your satisfaction. Changing variable such as city pairs or dates may help.

I have used Delta Sky Miles for the past 25 years and it always seems that they relish throwing annoying roadblocks into miles redemption. Just because a flight exists never means that it might have seats available as a reward. The result is inconvenience and sometimes extraordinarily long layovers. On the plus side, I pay a fee for the Amex Sky Miles card. The benefit is you get a substantial discount on the miles needed for a rewards ticket if all flights are on Delta. I earn my miles on a separate AMEX card which allows me to transfer miles to a number of airlines including Delta. When getting the Delta ticket, I simply transfer the miles from one card to the other. Periodically, some of the other AMEX partner airlines offer bonuses on transfers.

My largest resentment toward Delta is around 2006, they offered a 25% bonus for the transfer of any AMEX miles from Amex to Delta. Great deal. A few months later, Delta revised their rewards program doubling the number of Sky Miles needed to purchase a ticket. How underhanded can you get? Oh wait. It’s an airline. What do you expect?

So on the flights you like who is actually flying the plane? If it's not Delta metal your problem may be that the other carriers have not released flights to Delta. My experience is they will give you all their options but you may not like the pricing!

We got a great deal a few years ago, Minneapolis to Bordeaux, France. However the itinerary was terrible. On the way home, we flew Bordeaux to Paris to Seattle to Minneapolis. It was a code share with AirFrance. And the last time I've accepted an AirFrance codeshare.

I can be super flexible now, so I feel like I get great value with the skymiles. I use the flexible dates options to find a good window for travel dates. I have found that the nonstops are expensive with dollars and skymiles, and to Europe it seems like the codeshares (which I like to avoid) are most often the less expensive flights for the skymiles.

Very occasionally, I'll call Delta to make sure I'm seeing all of the flights available. There are many things I don't like about Delta, but their customer service is quite good. You just may have to sit on hold for a bit.

Delta.com is a breeze compared to britishairways.com, recent experience with points redemption on both. At least what shows on Delta.com is bookable, BA is filled with phantom flights not bookable. Also a pet peeve is that on ba.com, they shift the labels on the calendar to start the weeks on Sundays for Americans, but the underlying links are not changed. So booking May 23 you have to search for May 22 (to get results for May 23).

I think that if you know exactly what you want, then calling Delta may be helpful, but it
really depends on the agent you get. And the time on hold is also a factor.

If you are just poking around looking for a deal, then you won't get anywhere with an agent.

The agent is looking in the same database you are, so the hope/expectation they might
find something you can't would seem to be a function of your expertise vs theirs, and
most likely not a deliberate attempt to hide something from the website.

Do you think Delta's website is difficult to navigate vs other airlines, or is it the lack of results
that is the dissatisfier? It seems easy enough to navigate for me. Can you outline specific
issues you have?

Flight availability with miles can of course vary, and showing flights with no availability would
piss people off even more. And as noted, partner flights are often not released for mileage
bookings at the same time the flights are loaded into the database.

If the gist of your post is that Delta is deliberately holding back certain flights from having award
seat bookings, well, every airline can and does do that in some ways.

I’d take the itinerary with the 60 minute layover because 1, there’s a good possibility your flights times or itinerary will be changed anyway and 2, if you don’t make a connection, Delta will put you on the next flight.

Shoeflyer, Delta's website is easy to navigate. But at times there are technical issues. For instance, I have a Delta American Express card, which provides a 15 percent discount on SkyMiles used to book flights. Usually, the website will show that discount, but there are times, even when I am logged in, when the website does not show the 15 percent reduction. And of course, how the fares can change dramatically not only from day to day but seemingly at times from hour to hour is baffling.

Elizabeth, with flights of two or three hours, I can sit coach in the middle seat. But on international flights, I fly Delta Comfort because I like the extra legroom. Yes, if I miss a flight, Delta can find another flight for me, but sitting where. And because I check in a bag, I am always concerned about my bag making my connecting flight if my stated layover time is 60 minutes or less.

And yes, Delta's telephone customer service is very good, though the wait time can be lengthy.

I've never used SkyMiles to "pay" for a flight because of the issues noted above. What I have done, however, is use miles to upgrade our seats, especially on international flights. Also, a trick I learned on this Forum is to use the chat function on Delta's website.

Reederman, I show my ignorance. I didn't realize that could be done. Can you upgrade from coach to Comfort using SkyMiles? And with a SkyMiles purchase, you can readily cancel with a return of all SkyMiles. How does that work if you use SkyMiles only for an upgrade?

In case some of the flights you are looking at are codeshares ("this flight operated by AirFrance" or KLM or ?),I believe you do not get a 15 % skymiles discount.

Like it seems every human endeavor, there are sites that help you game the FFmiles system. There are also services that supposedly can get you more than you can get yourself. Check them out.

FF miles have become the classic bait and switch. Big promises, small deliveries. Yet people keep playing the game even though it's fixed.

The last sane advice I saw was, get a good cash back card, put everything on it and put that cash into a vacation account. It's easy to spend cash.

The last sane advice I saw was, get a good cash back card, put everything on it and put that cash into a vacation account. It's easy to spend cash.

I came to the same conclusion years ago. I am not wed to any one airline, I choose based on schedule and price (my regional airport is served by Delta, AA, and United, and prices for international flights from here are competitive). I also don't fly enough in a given year to earn meaningful status on any airline even if I chose to fly just one. The steady devaluation of airline miles that has been going on for decades is a form of "fool's gold" for people who play the game. And finally, I don't have the patience to play the mileage booking game, trying to book awards flights a year in advance; my style is to plan and book trips much closer to the trip date, usually within 3 months.

When I have accumulated miles, like back in the 80s and 90s when I flew a lot for business, I used the miles back then to fly to Japan, Hawaii, and Europe multiple times. Friends who stockpiled miles "for retirement" were banking fool's gold as they have learned the hard way.

This is a better discussion than usual on this topic, if I may give some praise to the Forum regulars.

I like what fly says about knowing exactly what you want and being patient with the phone agent -- they may try to oversee/oversight the flight you want and can see on their website, but if you do the bulldog with a bone thing for long enough, while they put you on hold several times, they may eventually give in. It seems as though they are doing you a favor for giving you what you wanted in the first place, and the agent gets paid no matter how long you spend on hold.

That's the key thing with services offered by megacorporations: the customer is paying to drag the interaction on and on, while the agent is being paid.

With regard to the cashback philosophy vs the use-miles philosophy, there are
(obviously) situations in which each works better than the other.

If you travel infrequently and are content to travel in economy, then getting cash
back on credit card transactions and using that $ as a discount on relatively
inexpensive fares is a good way to go. I suspect that is the domain of most of
the people who go on RS tours.

But, while miles have been generally devalued over time, it is still a completely
alternative form of currency, and thus may provide a different value proposition,
especially when hoping to book premium cabin seats.

For instance, my transatlantic flight (on AA) costs ~$400 in economy, but $3000
in PE and $5000 in business. But the miles required for PE are only 1.5x for
economy and 3x for business. This is in low season (another aspect to trying
to book flights using miles), but it makes the point that miles can be valuable
if you like to sit in the front of the plane. You'd have to spend 6 figures on a
card to get enough cashback to purchase a non-economy seat. I understand
that the cash pricing for PE/Business is lunatic, but, I think my point is still valid.

Thanks to all who have responded. In my case, I suspect that it would have made much more sense had I over the years used a cash-back card and bought my airline tickets with cash. But I didn't, still have a number of SkyMiles to be used, and have had and principally used my American Express card for 45 years. (On paper, there are benefits to using a card other than American Express. But last year, two days before flying out of the country, I had a major problem with a Visa card that took hours and several supervisors to resolve. One supervisor refused to transfer me to another supervisor, saying she was a supervisor and there was simply nothing Visa could do for me; on a subsequent telephone call, I found somebody above her who could help me. American Express would have resolved the issue in 10 minutes.)

I wouldn't write off all miles accumulation. When I lived in the US, I had an Amex Gold Card, not a Delta card, that paid 4 miles for every dollar spent at a grocery store or restaurant, and 3X on traavel. Now one thing we all have to do is eat, so for 4-X the miles awarded, I thought our flight awards were worth it, even counting the fee for the card. We also got a free domestic partner flight for one of us each year, so even the fee paid off.
When we moved overseas, I cashed out our miles and now do cash back if I'm using an American credit card. We don't have this system in France, just diddly debit cards, but I'm sure happy not to be counting, calculating, just cashing out.

I have a Chase card that I use most often. I also have the Delta Amex I use occasionally. I break even on it, or better, just with the flight credit, checked luggage, etc. I typically spend just enough to get the flight credit.

I typically fly multi-city to Europe once per year (usually on United or a partner) and take one domestic trip (almost never on United). From Washington-Dulles I've generally found it easy to snag frequent-flyer tickets to Europe even though I'm not often using London, Paris, Amsterdam or Frankfurt as a gateway and usually book two to five months ahead. Yesterday I took a peek at availability to Sarajevo and found flights for 40,000 miles one-way. It may well be that Dulles's status as a major east cost gateway has a lot to do with the ease of frequent-flyer redemptions. Yesterday's research revealed there is now a non-stop United flight from Venice to Dulles.

I check both the price in miles and the price in dollars to be sure I'm not making a financially foolish decision, but the total refundability of frequent-flyer tickets is comforting, especially as I get older and have to contemplate possible delays due to medical issues. Paying in miles looks like a better option when compared to a fully-refundable coach ticket rather than to standard coach. If not for that factor, I'd be happy just using a cash-back card.

I now am blessed with flexibility. There can be incredible Delta deals using skymiles. A couple years ago, we had roundtrip, Minneapolis to Auckland round trip for 32,500 miles/each, and more recently, we booked Minneapolis to Sydney, Australia for 72,000. Because of the New Zealand deals, we try to always have a balance of about 80,000 for these deals that come up every so often. There are flight deals often enough that I don't have to worry about accumulating excessive miles.

There are some places that I know I will never really get a deal on with miles, one being Hawaii

A major plus with using SkyMiles is that trips can be easily cancelled with a full return of Miles. If you book a trip using Skymiles, frequently check your Delta app or the Delta website to see whether the number of Skymiles for that trip has been reduced or whether more attractive options have been added. You need to check often, but if you do, chances are you can reduce the number of SkyMiles you are using.

A little off topic (Alaska vs Delta). I booked a flight Seattle to Helsinki for 27,500 pts plus some nominal amount of cash. If I had used cash back at 1% I would have received $275 in cash. I could never have actually purchased the ticket for that.

The last couple of years, I find fairly good deals for cash tickets quite frequently, but I am a "stalker". Any incredible, amazing deals I've found have been with skymiles, or a combination of skymiles and cash.

I have a lot of experience with Delta. I have never had a problem finding mileage or cash deals for transatlantic flights. Maybe it’s easier for us because of the numerous nonstops from JFK. We don’t have to connect. Perhaps this is the source of the challenge. Flexibility with days of travel always helps. For example, traveling on Tuesdays and Wednesdays on a non-holiday week is where I have found the best deals.

If you call Delta, you will probably never get the least expensive fare class from an agent. You can always try.

Three tips with using Skymiles.

First. stick to the major airports like London. Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Munich, Milan and Paris and--if you are flexible as to the day of the week--the perhaps seasonal nonstops to cities like Berlin and Prague. If you want to fly to a city like Dresden or Nuremburg, the options are far fewer and more expensive.

Second, it helps to be flexible as to day of the week and especially the season.

Third, this is a game. Your advantage using SkyMiles is you can cancel and transfer at will. If you are vigilant, you can find better deals. I have already saved 15,000 or 20,000 SkyMiles by making several changes to my flight schedule. But you have to check often until you have booked what you think is a really good deal. If you do this often enough, you can sense what the SkyMiles floor is. And there comes a point where hopefully the game is not worth the candle and you are satisfied with what you are paying.

I haven't dealt with this first hand yet, but I am led to believe that Delta now charges a
penalty for cancelling flights booked in Basic Economy using SkyMiles. I think it's still
a free xcel for regular Economy and PremEco/Business.

If so, thanks for letting everyone know. On flights to Europe, I book Premium Economy (or whatever it is called). But I book coach on domestic flights.

There are two different Coach categories you can choose from using SkyMiles. The more expensive one allows changes and cancellation without a charge. The first one does not. Again, to and from Europe, I book Comfort. In Comfort, you can make unlimited changes.

On flights to Europe, I book Premium Economy

Again, to and from Europe, I book Comfort

Careful, these are not the same thing.

Premium Select is the Delta seating that is a grade above Comfort. Delta's Comfort can be generically described as premium economy, which is the name that might actually be used by some airlines.

Comfort can be generically described as premium economy,

Not to me. Good luck with deliberately using the wrong terms and then expecting to be understood.

Interesting response.

As to Count I--"deliberately using the wrong terms and then expecting to be understood"--I plead Not Guilty (and move for an expedited trial date).

But as to any Count II--at times lacking perfect understanding or failing to carefully express what I do know--I plead No Contest.

Seriously, if anyone thinks my comments are wrong or might be misleading, please feel free to clarify.

Delta does make it a bit confusing with their labeling of classes of service. But as I see it:

Delta One - international business class (lie-flat seats, etc)
Delta First - domestic first class (wider and fewer seats across, food, free drinks)
Delta Premium Select - international premium economy
Delta Comfort - similar to United Economy Plus or AA Main Cabin Extra - more legroom in economy with some little perks
Delta Main - "regular" economy class with a few different booking options (basic & 2 shades of regular)

So, for what it's worth, Comfort is not the same as Premium Economy. More than likely, the
price difference should give you a clue that something is not what you thought it was.