Another short post on the weekend as there is really not much happening in the blogosphere. Just a little rant on useless Delta Skymiles…
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I think you all know my hate relationship with Delta and Skymiles. I used to love Northwest Airlines and Worldperks. As a Platinum Elite I used to call the Platinum Elite and could get any award I wanted, everytime. It was amazing and my loyalty never wavered. I am not going to get into details how ridiculously little I was paying to maintain my Platinum status, that is besides the point here 🙂 Ever since Delta came into the picture the award situation has been so drastically altered that is beyond anything my worst nightmares.
I am not going to go into the details of the continued Skymiles devaluations, the horrific award search engine that was promised to fix many years ago, the extremely insulting practices of announcing continued beatings while dressing them up as “good for you”, the withdrawal of the award charts, and many other anti consumer, anti Skymiles member practices. Many have done that and I cringe when Delta is being defended by other bloggers out there, you are part of the problem that many airlines now copy what Delta does.
So I stopped flying Delta and made it one of my missions not to give them a dime. I fly mostly on Southwest or whenever I can use my miles and on AA using Avios to New York City (just 9k Avios RT to La Guardia). I put my money where my mouth is or however this stupid saying goes.
Sadly, I still have many Delta Skymiles. I have just a little over 160k in mine and my daughter’s accounts. I have been trying to use them to get to Australia on Virgin Australia Business Class for a long time (on limited target dates admittedly) and have just about given up. Dealing with the Delta award engine and the SM agents has just sucked the life out of me and I just don’t have the patience anymore! Thankfully, some time ago I managed to snag a RT award to San Diego from Detroit for a conference, wow! But not much else…
I know there are workarounds when dealing with awards. And I don’t mind dealing with reasonable workarounds. But the way that Delta does awards is just criminal in my opinion. For example, giving to you the 160k award from Los Angeles to an Australian city (of course, I gave up on getting to LAX on Delta lol) online and you prematurely celebrating. Then allowing you to click through the screens, entering your passenger information, your credit card information for the taxes & fees, and then clicking on “Complete Purchase” and then…BANG!, the flight magically just sold out! And then when you call and speak to agents AND supervisors they come up with ridiculous excuses and just saying sorry but there is nothing they can do. Of course they can make it happen someway somehow at A LOT more miles than that. Amazing! This has happened numerous times. There should be a law about criminal practices like this!
Anyway, I was saying that these days my patience is running really low on putting award trips together. So, I have trained Mrs. TBB to help out. She was instrumental in taking the time to keep searching and booking our trip to Greece for four using AA and UA miles! So, she has been looking to book award trips to Malaysia for next summer. Anyways, I made the mistake to tell her “you know, you have about 240k Delta Skymiles in your own account that had been laying there for so long, if you find something lets just use them up as they will be even less valuable in 2016”. Well, maybe I shouldn’t have…
She comes screaming “I found two DL 40k miles each from Detroit to Kuala Lumpur one way”. Well, let’s just say I replied “No, you didn’t”. But she insisted to show me. And, idiot me, I said yes. I was having a great day up to that point! Well, there they were, two seats at 40k each. The rest of the award seats were for more than that, naturally Delta-like! She excitedly tries to book them, goes through all the screens, credit card information, clicks on “Complete Purchase” while jumping in joy and then BANG! Comes crashing down with the horrific error message in bloody red font that the flight magically, amazingly, just sold out! I told her to call and we went through the whole ridiculous scenario that the award seats are just not there. And I ask you: If they are not there they should NEVER appear online. Ok, I give you that sometimes things with partners develop, fine. But for crying out loud, why inflict the pain on your members and waste their time to go through the screens entering information, credit card and even getting them to the final screen to ‘Complete Purchase”? Isn’t this cruel and unusual punishment or what? And then training the phone agents to basically say “sorry, they are not there for _______”. So, I got on the phone and lost my temper after speaking with yet another supervisor who just don’t give a crap anymore, this is the way we do things around here blah blah blah.
I told my wife she is on her own and never to bother me with her Delta Skymiles anymore…I think she is thinking of attempting to do it paying LOT more than 40k each. I told her to do whatever she wants and not tell me about it because paying three times or whatever it is (she would not know what it is of course, try to find the award chart huh?) is something that will be the ultimate humiliation for me so called miles expert!
I thought about documenting my ordeals with my attempts to burn my last Skymiles and then suing them. And then I came to my senses. I just ignore these assholes!
Boycott Delta. Hurt them where it matters. If a blogger pumps credit cards that earn Skymiles run away from them. The aggravation and disruption to your inner peace is just not worth it. Stop finding excuses, hub captive my behind.
I feel better. Enjoy your day!
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Training your wife to book Delta awards.
Brilliant. Simply brilliant.
Never this proud to be first.
Obviously, she has a lot to learn lol.
So proud of your First!
Second, again and again.
Wait, are you Spencer F’s identical twin or what?
This was a 2nd, but Delta devalued it to 3rd
Sounds about right!
Ask Deltapoint for help and suggest that you move him up to “Blogs that give me wood”.
Lol. Sell sell sell….unless they take the links away so go to selling what you have left 🙂
To quote ren&stimpy: ‘It’s log, it’s log, it’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood!’
Anyways, George, being p!ssed about DL is soo 2010ish, move on. If you want to be a trendsetter, start detailing the ways AA will screw everyone… start now!
DL is great if you don’t have skypesos bakend away. Good punctual service, clean planes, decent priced F tickets… the other US3 can’t do that?
I think the DL “operational” successes are way over rated 🙂
I moved to a smaller city which has a small airport and the 1-2 Delta flights per day to their hubs are insanely expensive (~$500 RT). I’ll be more than happy to take your Skypesos off your hands if you hate them. Award seats for these flights are usually plentiful.
That makes a skypeso worth at least 2c. Frequentmiler and OMAAT can now adjust their anal point models.
Feel sorry about that Chris! I am open to god deals.
TBB keeps no point models whatsoever. I keep a BS meter instead woohoo!
Man, my heart goes out to you. Seriously! And I’ve had my “Delta moments” when I was ready to just break the f&%king monitor or pull out all that little hair I have left. But, no offense, you begin to sound like Gary, who is upset that airlines don’t like their customers. That’s laughable, IMHO.
Awards to Australia are notoriously finicky. In this particular case, I don’t think it’s the Delta but Virgin Australia bug. Just go to the FT Delta forum, and you will see that sometimes they work and other times they don’t, simple as that.
But no matter what, why are you fixating on one destination? Have you considered Europe on VS? You want to go to Asia, Have you tried KE out of LAX? Or fly from JFK to Europe (and get here on Avios or Spirit). Who is saying anything about giving them money!!!???
In a few days, I’m flying from JFK to HAM on VS and KLM, with the return from KEF on DL.
In October, I’m flying on KE from HAN to JFK (2 tickets).
Booked another flight for my cousin on KE all the way down from JFK to REP.
All on Delta miles, all in J, all in Saver, and all without a hitch.
If you keep your miles unredeemed, who’s going to laugh all the way to the bank? You? Don’t think so.
Just my 0.02 SkyPesos.
Virgin to Europe is disgusting. I flew it once (J of course) and felt like laying down in a morgue.
Awful, awful plane and a terrible airport. But the lounge was nice…
Just went with a family of 4. Worked perfectly fine in coach. We even got a menu and the food was better than average.
I am really glad for all of you who manage to use your Skyshit the way you want to.
Maybe DL has me black listed or something.
My point is: If you show them online, they should be booked. Getting your members to go through all the screens and clicking on the “complete purchase” button should be a misdemeanor. When you call and you hear the reps accusing everyone else but never the DL award search engine (including supervisors) should be a felony, especially when you have it up on your laptop screen. WTF!!!
I flew Virgin Atlantic once on Business. I found the seats the most uncomfortable weirdly placed. Kind of a sideays reverse herringbone without the cow. Or something like that haha.
I guess I need to spend some time on flying KE with Skyshit. Idea for blog post Andy?
I must admit I have a very short fuse with Skyshit. This is one (only one) reason I agree with Gary who has been on top of this. The rest of the blogs should stand up for what is right business practices and not condone and keep finding excuses to fly this airline.
I am still angry…but getting over it.
I told Mrs. TBB, you use them the way you want, just don’t talk to me about them…
Delta doesn’t just hose its customers, it’s proud of hosing them. Good rant.
Thanks. It felt good!
Let’s explore this about using KE (is that Korean Airlines?) to see if Buzz can get his trip to Kuala Lumpur, if I am understanding this lingo correctly.
Are there any awards travel booking experts in the house ?
OK Buzz when do you want to go ? Next summer ? Let’s see if it is indeed possible to use your Delta points in the fashion mentioned above.
I would have no idea how to do this, just brainstorming here to see if the suggestion has some merit.
A good day to all !
🙂
Actually, Mrs. TBB came through, story at 11…eer, I mean in the new TBB post.
Apparently, Korean Air using Skymiles book without a hitch online.
I’ve basically been “done” with Skypesos since they started all their shenanigans the last few years. Saw the writing on the wall early and booked the bulk of my remaining miles on an Australia trip for 4. We had a great time down under but I still had about 100K left in my account. Ten or so days ago, Delta released an “award sale” which I initially ignored because my hub city generally doesn’t get much action. Then I read a post from FM late last week talking about expanded availability during the sale, even from hubs, so I had a look. Sure enough, I found nonstop flight tickets to Europe for only 42K roundtrip that fit our schedule. Grabbed 4 tickets with some help from MRs and am now relieved that I was able to wring good value out of my last stash of SkyPesos. Those same tickets were selling at a crazy price of $2332 each on the Delta web site!
Good for you. Mrs. TBB managed to burn 220k DL miles so we are getting there as well…slowly.
Gary does nail it today, though. Delta runs an operation that AA and United can only dream of.
Whilst a non-ideal comparison, there are reasons why Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental etc do not have loyalty programmes. They don’t need to bribe people to stay with them.
I think DL is over rated about their “operations” and comparing them to the hotel chains you state is waaaaay too kind!
Erik thanks for the contribution, noob here trying to absorb info. Where did you get the info about the expanded sale ?
Raffles, could you explain to this noob what you mean about Delta running an operation etc etc ?
Thanks !
😀
Operations: no delays, clean planes, good service, and a whole bunch of other airline metrics. I think it is over rated because the other suck so so bad.
The DL “sale”: was blogged about in other blogs. I thought about linking to it here but I thought it was another deceitful move to trick their customers 🙂
Two ways I found out: 1) Delta sent me an e-mail about the award sale. Make sure you have “opted-in” to their e-mail offers on your SkyMiles profile. This will also help you score the occasional way-better-than-normal targeted Amex credit card offer. 2) The Frequent Miler (FM) blog actually alerted me to the fact that there were expanded “low” seats showing from hubs during the sale, which is very un-Delta like. If I hadn’t read his blog that morning, I would have never checked availability. I’ve been so used to finding nothing with DL that I simply quit looking…it was just easier to use miles that I had in other programs to accomplish my travel goals.
I was able to take advantage of the recent sale and book MSP-CDG-MSP in biz for 87k. Not bad at all for what I consider to be an excellent product on the A333 (seats comfortable and FA’s keep your wine glass full!). I wholly agree that their Skymiles program is wrapped in deceit and I can’t even begin to quantify all the endless hours I’ve spent on their damn award search engine. On the plus side, though, I have have been able to maximize the opportunities when they present themselves such as the recent sale.
I also miss my beloved red-tails here in Minneapolis.
I don’t have that many hours left in me to mess in diz thind called award search engine 🙂
That’s what I’m talking about, I used one of those award travel booking service guys, it was $125, I think the second ticket is $50, and I didn’t have to go scrounging around for it. I think some of these guys have software written to do the scrounging for them.
Well ? ? ?
What about flying KE to Kuala ?