Saving for that perfect award redemptions on Delta? Congratulations! You must now pay tens of thousands of more miles for the same trip. Just another day in the accountability-free world of Delta SkyMiles. The latest Delta SkyMiles partner award devaluation will make your head spin.
Another Delta SkyMiles Devaluation On Partner Awards
It was only last week that I noted United Airlines had raised prices on its partner premium award redemptions. Kyle Potter of Thrifty Traveler noted:
For all the (often righteous) anger Delta gets for its handling of SkyMiles, United has arguably done more, much faster, to devalue its miles. https://t.co/CdGyZcLFA5
— Kyle Potter (@kpottermn) October 19, 2020
True statement…until today.
Potter himself broke the news that partner awards on Delta have suddenly skyrocketed in price. In some cases, think inflation of the hyper variety…
As he put it:
File this under “takes that did not age well” https://t.co/B0ZLZhRNtC cc: @LiveandLetsFly https://t.co/tig6GKgN4J
— Kyle Potter (@kpottermn) October 27, 2020
So let’s look at the damage. Delta, like United, no longer publishes an award chart. The price you see is the price you pay. Delta hides behind this to claim that devaluation are not really devaluations. But what do you call it when something that was 95K is now 170K?
Hint: it’s still a devaluation.
Partner awards still price at a set level, based upon region, carrier, and date of travel. (i.e., you won’t find Air France or KLM award flights fluctuating in price on the same day).
But let’s take a look at a few examples.
We’ll start with Virgin Atlantic, one of Delta’s transatlantic partners.
Recently, one-way tickets on Virgin Atlantic have been 86,000 miles one-way in business, with a slight surcharge if booking close to travel.
Now, even if you book more than 60 days in advance, you’ll be looking at a minimum of 95,000 miles for business class or 70,000 miles for premium economy.
But if your travel is between 21-60 days away, you’re looking at an extra 5,000 point for economy or premium economy…and an extra 75,000 miles (!) for business class. That’s not a typo!
Book within three weeks of travel and you’ll pay 55,000 for a one-way economy class ticket, 105,000 for premium economy class, and 195,000 for business class. Again, that’s one-way pricing…
My reaction is simply:
Of course there are loopholes. No, you cannot prepay years in advance.
Add on an Air France flight and the price drops from 170K to 105K. #logic
Hint: check Tel Aviv and travel with hand baggage…
It’s not just Virgin Atlantic that has gone up in price. Partner awards across the board have gone up. Air France and KLM awards, for example, jumped from 75,000 to 95,000 each way in business lass and 25,000 to 35,000 each way in economy class.
Why This Matters
I’ve long warned that miles and points are depreciating assets meant to be spent, not hoarded. Nothing changes in terms of that general advice. But there’s an implied contract of good faith and fair dealing here…if I entice you to collect miles and save up for an award, it’s manifestly unreasonable to massively inflate the price without notice.
But that’s simply what Delta does. Over and over again. We’ve had a reprieve lately, but Delta has raised prices without warning for years.
Here’s what I’d do if I were you: rip up your Delta American Express cards. Call up American Express to complain and cancel them. Use a flexible card like the Chase Sapphire Preferred or American Express Gold instead.
Delta only does this because it can get away with it. But I can tell you, the values are simply not there. There once was value in paying 85K and $5.60 in taxes for a last-minute New York to London ticket when Virgin Atlantic was charging 45K miles but $600 in taxes/fees for the same ticket.
Not anymore. If you think 195K miles and $24.50 is a better deal than 45K miles and $600, please just switch to a cash-back card.
CONCLUSION
Delta shows a fundamental disregard, indeed a fundamental disdain for its members by raising partner award prices without notice. It also shows this by eliminating award charts in the first place.
But none of this should come as a surprise. After all, Delta noted in a recent regulatory filing that its SkyMiles program is “an attractive business model allowing flexibility to control costs and preserve margins.”
We know what that means…more clearly than ever.
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I think this is the way things are heading across the board. For years now things have only gotten worse, not better. UA and AA are well on their way. If our community wants to see a real change we must hit them where it hurts the most and that’s buying miles and airline credit card spend. If we doing stop these things then perhaps they’ll reassess their consistent anti-loyalty approach.
Simple. Don’t fly Delta and collect their miles. When travel comes back next year, they will feel the pain.
I’ve found that searching r/t drops the price significantly. It’s still crap but not as crap. Their one-way prices internationally have been awful for years.
Second, Skymiles are much more valuable(less “unvaluable”) domestically.
Wanna travel on Virgin Atlantic upfront? Transfer AMEX MR’s to VA site and book often at 50K Upper Class.
Delta is barely even trying anymore..
It’s very simple – if DL really believes that COVID has forever changed the future of business travel (at least for years out) and most travel will now be leisure, then the concept of airline loyalty is meaningless to them. Anyone on these sites already understand the very different nature of a leisure traveler as opposed to business, so I won’t bother explaining that other than to say the only way a leisure is ever going to amass enough points to do anything meaningful (forget about aspirational) is to constantly turn credit cards which is becoming more difficult. The people who really get hurt are families who want to travel. Why? Because they have the least flexibility and will have to travel on the school holiday schedule – always at the most competitive times when awards are either non-existent or astronomical. Within a year all schools will be back in normal session (as it should be because we’re killing the development of a generation of kids – topic for another conversation) so families will have no choice. A true leisure traveler can be very flexible and search for off peak deals, odd flight times, etc. They may not even be restricted to the work week with remote possibilities. Delta has the right idea for the very near term, but if all this is a fad and we realize that business on a large scale cannot be conducted remotely (except for very specific roles and people who are happy being removed from coworkers, limiting opportunity for advancement) it will be hard to win back the business travelers or make anyone believe their points have much value at all. Delta has long had some of the least valuable points, now even more so. Who on earth would want a Delta credit card or put a single cent earned on spend into their program given all the other options? Good luck putting that $250 ticket on your DL Amex (or any other spend) thinking it’s getting you towards that great award flight! In fact, I don’t understand why anyone would want to accumulate points as anything other than MR or UR from here on out.
All the mortgage arrangements for the FF programs should be available on-line somewhere as the airlines are public companies. I have not read them yet, but I would be curious if someone has and can figure out of they incentives airlines to devalue their programs. Obviously taking the words of the PR departments mean nothing.
It’s time for a spartan approach to treating covid.
Execute anyone that comes down with covid. And only the truly sinful die of covid which is a divine punishment so we should burn down the house of anyone that dies of covid and sell their family as slaves to the middle east kingdom.
#maga
Matthew, can you make a recommendation on which SkyTeam program is best to credit flight miles to, for those occasions when we’re forced to fly Delta going forward?
I have a question: what does everyone think will happen when travel to europe becomes possible again? Will award and cash prices temporarily drop in order to attract more flyers or will rates stay inflated to cover losses?
Aa an example I have my family of four booked economy to europe for 27k/each in February. Booked during the middle of 2020 (we have to plan around school calendars as mentioned by another poster). Fares on DL such as those have been fairly common in my experience if you don’t care what city you enter into and book far enough out.
Will those rates ever return?
Matthew, would you consider doing an article about other sky team airlines who would be better to bank miles with? Perhaps when people begin leaving SkyMiles in droves, Delta will wake up. Want to cancel my SkyMiles American Express(been paying annual fee without using it in years), but a decrease in credit availability can hurt your credit score 🙁
There is another important thing to mention…this is probably (partly) a result of the elimination of change/cancellation fees. Notice how DL increases the award price the closer you get to flight date. Similar to how United said they were eliminating close-in fees and then just raised award ticket prices to offset. DL shows very clearly how much of a joke these programs are becoming. The level of knowledge, savvy, research, flexibility, time, etc…you need to have to find just one good award ticket is absurd. Any normal traveler should look at points programs as completely useless except for either the CC points or just cash back cards.
To the questions on where to bank miles – It doesn’t matter. They are basically all worthless. So your few thousand miles accumulate with VA instead of DL. Wow, only a ridiculous amount of traveling left before you have enough points to even consider the search for an elusive low level economy ticket. Yay. My advice, unless you are a very frequent flier (business or leisure) ignoring loyalty point programs won’t cost you anything in the end.
Thanks for mentioning this. I just cancelled my business Skymiles card in a surprisingly quick and painless chat session after reading your post.
A race to the bottom when it comes to loyalty. They are clearly seeing that it doesn’t matter. So why should it matter to us?
More and more the free agent and just pay for it and be damned the entire scheme of rewards is becoming more a reality for me. Hotels can get away with it…but I spend more time in them. Yet airlines seem to forget that the difference between Spirit and DL for a few hours of my life is not worthy of anything but the cheapest and most convenient.
No wonder the WaPo had an article today that Frontier is the best positioned airline to emerge stronger post covid.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/road-to-recovery/frontier-airlines-pushes-ahead-with-some-success-despite-pandemic/2020/10/27/57470f90-1583-11eb-bc10-40b25382f1be_story.html
The article I speak of. While we all talk about how Covid may forever change the mindset of business travel, here we see perhaps the future and why Delta and others don’t care anymore. They see the writing on the wall. Their race to the bottom is about survival.
I said it two years ago, that many of the blogs out there (not this one so much as Matthew is very in tune with the industry and shifts and not a “hacker”) will be forgotten soon. Or reshape themselves as nostalgicTumblr memories of what it was like back in the day when we paid nothing and sipped Krug and took showers on flights from Dubai to Paris.
The game is pretty much over.
You’re right Stuart. Other than the actual competitive routes (NYC-LAX, NYC-LHR, etc) why bother with all this crap. Airline loyalty and points have become so cumbersome, difficult to manage and low value except for the few of us who really have the time and energy to follow all the nuance. Airlines should either bring back the fixed awards, for example: 1 way coach ticket 25K miles any time, any flight always available if there is a seat for sale (or 30K or whatever number makes sense). Also, why even continue having 1st class on flights less than 2hrs? Do what the European carriers do, block a few middle seats the first two rows and there’s your first class if you need it. I really enjoyed the points game, but I think like most things on the internet, it’s own growing popularity killed it. How crazy is it that there are entire businesses based around telling you how to use points? That shouldn’t be the case, any average Joe should be able to stay at hotel or fly an airline and know exactly what they can do with their points (should they care to bother accumulating them) without needing a PhD in logistics.