When Delta Air Lines depublished its Skymiles award charts in February, we were told that we no longer needed charts because the online pricing system would tell us how many miles were required for any given trip. The problem was the system did not seem to be working correctly: trips were pricing higher than the highest level on the award chart. Now we know why and that the system was actually working as intended. The culprit was not a computer malfunction, but a deliberate move by Delta that evidences an unannounced yet destructive devaluation of your Delta miles. Read on for Delta’s shocking admission and what this means to you.
A Closer Look at Delta’s Pricing “Issue”
First off, a short disclaimer — my goal is to make this as clear and concise as possible, but when dealing with the complexity of the Delta Skymiles, this is no easy task. I will do my best to define words and concepts where applicable.
I wrote a post entitled, How to Outsmart Delta’s Broken Website and Save Miles in March that pointed out the issue of Delta segments pricing cumulatively. For example, an itinerary from LAX-ATL-MIA was pricing at 100,000 miles one-way but according to the now-removed Skymiles award chart, the maximum price for a one-way trip within North America in first class should have been only 55K.
Delta was charging for two one-way tickets, one from LAX-ATL and one from ATL-MIA. The system was pricing LAX-ATL as an RK award (Level 5, 55K one-way) and ATL-MIA as an RS award (Level 4, 45K one-way). [Click here for a primer on Delta’s different award levels]
I labeled Delta’s website “broken” and offered instructions on calling Delta’s international manual reissue in order to properly price the award, in this case at 55K instead of 100K.
In April, I had a chance to speak to Skymiles Managing Director Karen Zachary at an event in Atlanta and asked her about the award pricing issues, to which she carefully stated that Delta would fix any website errors, but denied there were any problems despite the puzzled faces of me, Lucky, and Gary pointing to exactly the sort of situations described above.
About a month ago, an Award Expert client in New York asked me for two tickets to Johannesburg in mid-December using her Delta miles. She was not interested in flying KLM or Air France through Europe, leaving only Delta’s own flights via Atlanta. According to the award chart, the maximum price for a one-way business class ticket to South Africa is 175K miles (OK class). But there is no more award chart…
For early flights from New York with long layovers in Atlanta, the award would price at 175K as expected. But for shorter connections in Atlanta, segments were charged separately and the award would price much higher.
My clients wanted the shortest segment, meaning a 3:15p departure from JFK so the connection in ATL was only 1hr, 24 minutes. Under that scenario, the first segment priced at RS (Level 4, 45K one-way) and the ATL-JNB segment still priced at OK (Level 5, 175K one-way). So instead of 175K, formerly the highest rate that could be charged on a trip from anywhere in the Lower 48 to South Africa when flying on Delta’s own airplanes, the system asked for 45K additional miles for the first segment.
Is this the real impetus behind Delta’s website update stating that mixed-cabin awards were no longer permitted? Was this just an issue that “first class” and “business class” cannot be mixed?
No! Because there was no problem mixing first class and business class if you were willing to depart earlier from JFK — there the two segments did not price out cumulatively.
I figured a call to Delta’s International Manual Reissue Desk would fix this.
My Calls to Delta’s International Manual Reissue (IMR) Desk
It seemed logical to me that if a Level 4 award was available from JFK-ATL, a higher-priced Level 5 must also be available. What I found instead was that agents are no longer empowered to “force” segments into the HIGHER booking class in order for the system to price two segments as a single award. The system simply no longer permits this — even 30-year veterans could not get the JFK-ATL priced into RK class, thus the fare remained “broken” in Atlanta and required extra miles.
I am the type of person who does not take no for answer and upon the first agent’s inability to price the segment in the fare class I wanted, I chalked it up to incompetence. So I called again and got the same answer. And again, and got the same answer. And again, and again, and again. And believe me, these agents were trying and seemed just as puzzled as I was. But I kept hearing the same refrain–“the computer says no”.
Four hours later, I threw in the towel. Delta’s system is intentionally designed to block agents from selling into a different award booking code than the system designates on Delta flights. There is no longer a way around it — at least not one that I have been able to find. The machines have taken over!
It became clear that the new fare logic undergirding Delta’s website prices awards on an origin-destination basis, meaning that the system allocates award seats based specifically on your departing city and arriving city. For more popular routes, like New York to Johannesburg, the system will not offer a through-fare on more convenient routings ostensibly because these flights are so popular that the market will bear charging for two segments. I hope that is clear. As an aside, this is true only for Delta’s own award flights, not for awards flights on its SkyTeam partners.
Delta Confirms On the Record That Its Website is Not Broken
With that theory in mind, I reached out to Delta with the following: is Delta using exclusively origin-destination (O&D) availability to price awards? If so, then the system appears to be working fine, there is no problem of cumulative pricing, and the O&D rule has allowed Delta to charge even more for many awards without a formal devaluation announcement.
The answer I received was not surprising. Referencing the example above, a Delta spokesman confirmed via e-mail:
The reason this is occurring is that all Award trips are priced on an O&D basis. For these particular itineraries there is no availability (award or revenue) on an O&D basis. The cost that is being returned is the sum of the local segments, which have availability, but in essence require the customer to purchase two OW tickets JFK-ATL and then ATL-JNB, instead of one to JFK-JNB.
There it is folks — an admission from Delta and the clearest indicator yet of why the Skymiles Award Chart was removed.
What Delta is saying is that it will not sell a through-ticket from New York to Johannesburg in business class on that particular afternoon flight from New York to Atlanta. Sure enough, if you search on delta.com for a revenue business class ticket, you can book the two segments together, but the system also breaks it up. In fact, you cannot even book ATL-JNB in a premium cabin:
Yet my clients are the only two passengers booked in first class right now on that JFK-ATL flight: you can still cheaply get a first class seat if you buy that flight separately:
So if I can theorize what is going on, Delta is telling us that people booking from New York to Johannesburg looking for a good connection are willing to pay a big premium (in $ or in miles) to get one. Hence, the system does not allow JFK-ATL-JNB pricing as a single-award on these high-demand flights. If you want to save miles (or $), you need to travel earlier to Atlanta on a much less popular flight.
The Delta spokesperson added–
You called it an unannounced “devaluation”, but I would suggest this is consistent with the way we’ve priced [revenue] tickets for years.
He’s right in a way — the Delta website has been “broken” for years, or at least we assumed it was broken.
But up until recently, we could get around the broken website with the aid of agents who would book award flights into a higher booking class so that each flight in a multi-segment itinerary would be of the same tier and price as a single award. The ability to do that is now over.
Practically, that signifies a huge devaluation for those in the know who were able to reference the award chart and work with agents to ensure that a one-way award really did not price more than the award chart specified. We really are now at the mercy of the automated pricing system.
Can You Use the Multi-City Search Tool to Get Around This?
Delta.com offers a multi-city award search tool, but it will not help you. In fact, don’t use it — it used to be a nice tool but now works horribly, pricing anything you search for separately as a separate award.
Say you want to travel from Los Angeles to Perth on Virgin Australia and use the multi-city search tool to search LA to Sydney, then connecting from Sydney to Perth immediately after arrival. If the search works (often it simply doesn’t and you get the error message below), it will price the awards separately — 80K for LAX to SYD and another 40K for SYD to PER. Had you just searched from LAX to PER, the award would price out as 80K for both segments with the connection in SYD.
Not working for even simple and straightforward partner itineraries, the multi-city search tool is certainly not a way around the issue I have outlined above.
In Conclusion
Let’s review what we have learned:
1. The website works fine — there are no pricing glitches
2. Cumulative pricing is the new norm — O&D fare logic may mean that you pay more if you want a better connection
3. Forget multi-city tool online — it usually does not function and when it does, always prices cumulatively
4. Delta’s senior IMR agents cannot override this
Savvy travelers redeem for low-level awards on partner carriers and nothing has changed in that respect. Sometimes, though, it is necessary to travel on Delta and when that happens you need to know that the award charts upon which we used to rely are now of even more limited value. If you want to travel on certain high-demand connecting itineraries, you are going to have pay for your segments separately. You heard it directly from Delta…
> Read More: Delta Responds: Mixed Cabin Rewards Remain…Sort Of
> Read More: Delta Defiantly Removes Online Skymiles Award Charts
> Read More: How to Outsmart Delta’s Broken Website and Save Miles
> Read More: Delta Air Lines Worldwide Skymiles Award Charts
> Read More: Tiffany’s comprehensive post on the matter
Nice piece.
I guess my question is, if they are going to do this in bits and pieces with ridiculous approaches, why not just rip the bandage and go full revenue-based?
The more I think about the actions of this team, the more I believe their actions are shameful. If they aren’t going to make an announcement about it they have to know that it’s shady to do. It doesn’t hurt those in the know like readers and writers of this site – we know we can just move our business.
However, it is damaging for the unsuspecting occasional traveler that is loyal to Delta for years and makes them THEIR airline with simple expectations – moderate flying every year on the same airline leads to an occasional free ticket.
With their new earning devaluation (on international itineraries a devaluation of 6-9x) and then the massive devaluation of the award chart (40-100% higher), and then now this (add 20-50%) they might as well shutter the program. Except they won’t now, because it will be hugely profitable for them under the auspices of their previous relative value. For some travelers its up to 18x worse than it was before. Stealth changes highlight that they know most casual travelers are just not going to look into the changes or see what is going on.
If miles are a currency (the EU ruled a couple of years ago that they were) then they basically have officially become the Zimbabwean dollar but people are still collecting them like they are pesos.
Four hours?!?! You are far more tenacious than I (which is saying something)!
@Tiffany — four hours indeed! No exaggeration. I wanted to verify once and for all that it just is not impossible to override “Skynet” anymore.
It took Delta three-weeks to respond to my questions, so I have to imagine that the quote above was very carefully worded and confirms officially what you wrote about last month and what we all have been noticing for the last several months.
Could you book out most of the JFK-ATL flight first cabin, leaving only a single F seat available which would then presumably be Tier5 and thus pair with the JNB segment? Then cancel your paid F dummy bookings.
This totally jibes with what I’ve been seeing recently with Delta. I’ve had to fly for personal reasons between NYC-CVG which is an absurdly captive market for Delta, thus the fares are always ridiculously high (I don’t think I’ve seen a coach fare below $500 r/t since I’ve started going to CVG). Whenever I try to use miles, even if the non-stop flights are the cheapest options in terms of money, they are almost invariably priced at a higher mileage rate than flights with connections. On the one hand this could be for revenue management reasons, since even if two or three weeks out there are lower fares on the nonstops than the connections, Delta knows they will probably sell close to all of the seats between NYC and CVG by flight time, and for a super high price to boot. On the other, its incredibly frustrating to use miles to avoid high fares for such a short domestic flight to begin with, and jacking up the mileage prices on the nonstop flights only adds insult to injury.
THIS is what I think we should all fear with the impending AAdvantage devaluation, as opposed to a move to a revenue-based scheme. AA has already planted the seeds of opacity with Level 3 AAnytime awards, where no chart or calendar is published to suggest what the required mileage levels are, or when they apply. I could see Doug Parker effectively imposing a blackout on routes and dates that people actually want to redeem with a ridiculous, unpublished mileage requirement, while spinning the move as a “market-driven, customer-focused enhancement” by allowing you to fly to Wichita Falls at 10:35 P.M. on a Tuesday for 5,000 miles (no offense meant to the fine city and citizens of Wichita Falls).
“The Seeds of Opacity” would be an awesome name for a rock band.
To be honest, it’s shenanigans like these that forced me to move to American Airlines. Yes, I have to make a connection for every flight, pretty much guaranteed, but i’ve come to love first class on the commuter flights that are small jets. You get personalized service and a cocktail. Love it.