After my talk on award booking at the Chicago frequent flyer seminar last month, I committed to putting together much of the advice that I shared in the form of blog posts. That takes a good long time, the reason I haven’t shared my talks here on the blog in the past is because I’ve never written them down, I tend to sketch out an outline and just talk.

In order to keep things sufficiently interesting (for me, in the writing!), I won’t be writing up the different sections in order. But I’ll piece it all together in the end.

Delta Skymiles are often referred to as “SkyPesos” because they are less valuable and more difficult to use than miles in major competitor programs. I’ve found this to be true for several reasons.

• Their pricing engine is broken. A US-Australia award may be priced at 150,000 miles roundtrip in business class, and it may be that the award is supposed to include flights inside the US to the international gateway city, but even if those flights offer award space Delta may price it additively — 45,000 miles roundtrip for domestic first class plus 150,000 miles roundtrip for international business class. This can lead to some really absurdly priced awards. Another example is New York to Los Angeles via Phoenix, in my experience it will always price as two awards even if you otherwise comply with all rules and the space is there.

• The award booking website is broken. It won’t show flights even though those flights are available. It offers only a very limited subset of partner award flights online. It often displays incorrect — even logically impossible — prices. And it frequently spits out errors at the very end of the booking process. Most frustrating of all? Delta Skymiles will only put award space on hold through their website, which means most partner awards cannot be held and when the website malfunctions even Air France awards cannot be held.

• Delta agents are poorly trained. I am frequently told things like “Vietnam Airlines is not part of Skyteam” … “You can only book awards on airline partners for routes that Delta does not fly.” … “There’s no award space available (when there clearly is, even on the awful Delta website).” Part of the problem is that Delta’s partners use a variety of booking classes and their systems aren’t especially automated, meaning that the booking process is more complicated than for Star Alliance airline programs. But Delta hasn’t done a particularly good job of compensating for this with training.

• Routing rules are restrictive. They don’t allow you to fly to Asia via Europe. They don’t offer one-way awards at half the price of roundtrip. They don’t allow any changes to awards inside 3 days of departure.

• Delta availability is poor compared to other airlines. While Delta does tend to offer a few award seats when schedules open, and much better availability close to departure, I often find that I can get international business class award space on their partners — the biggest challenge is getting a domestic flight (even in coach) to the international gateway city. I’ll take any other major domestic airline’s award availability over Delta’s, and certainly they’re nowhere near as good as American or even US Airways (the latter offering excellent domestic first class award space).

• They add fuel surcharges to awards on many of their partners. For awards departing the U.S. it’s generally just V Australia which they hit you with fuel surcharges for, but most partners departing from outside the U.S. will mean fuel surcharges. American adds fuel surcharges to British Airways award flights only (as does Alaska Airlines), and no other U.S. airline imposes fuel surcharges on awards at all.

• Delta’s program doesn’t include any option for 3-cabin international first class redemptions. I realize that isn’t meaningful to everyone, but it’s a key aspirational component of a program, the ability to redeem for the sorts of awards that let you experience things otherwise orders of magnitude beyond your reach. Even though they have partners offering a true first class product, they won’t let you spend your miles for it.

• They add an international origination surcharge for awards beginning outside North America. This means members are out of pocket more for awards which begin abroad than if they were spending United, American, US Airways, etc. miles.

• They only just this year even published an award chart for awards that neither begin nor end in North America. Many of those awards are astronomically expensive compared to competitors.

Sure, some other programs may suffer from one or more of these defects. United’s website isn’t very good for booking award seats, it only offers a handful of partner airlines currently, though they’ll be adopting the Continental platform which includes most all of the Star Alliance. But no other major North American program suffers from the rest of the defects above, certainly not to the extent in any case that Delta’s does.

But all is not lost, and I’ve actually found the Delta program to be very useful. You just need to understand its limitations, some workarounds, and the strategic opportunities that are included in the program.

So here is my guide to making the Delta Skymiles program work for you.

• Who can you book awards on? Delta’s Skyteam partners include Air France, Alitalia, Aeroflot, Aeromexico, Air Europa, China Airlines, China Eastern, China Southern, Czech, Kenya, KLM, Korean, TAROM, and Vietnam Airlines. Several airlines will join in the future, like Saudi Arabian and Garuda Indonesia, but you can not book awards with those yet. In addition to Skyteam partners, you can use other airline partners not in Skyteam as well, including Air Tahiti Nui, Alaska Airlines, Avianca, Gol, Hawaiian Airlines, Jet AIrways, Kingfisher, Malaysia, and V Australia. I would expect the Kingfisher and Malaysia partnerships to go away when those two airlines join Oneworld.

• You can book their partners’ codeshare flights, even when those are operated by another airline. The classic example is Air Mauritius flights with an Air France code on them. (Incidentally, I’ve had codeshare flights of Delta partners post to my Skymiles account when flying a paid ticket as well, e.g. Cyprus Airways flights with an Alitalia code).

• Getting awards held. Delta only holds awards on the website, not by phone, and even when the website works it only offers a handful of partners. If you want to hold an award using other partners, create an itinerary of some kind so that you have a confirmation number, then call. At least half the time Delta agents will add to the reservation for you and leave it on hold, though I’ve had it take 2-3 calls to find one who will do so. The key here is that it’s a reservation that started on the website. Supposedly holds are only for a day but in practice it’s often 2 days (when booking in the morning) since the hold will expire at the end of the next day. Itineraries departing from Asia can actually be held for 7 days.

• Avoiding the telephone booking fee. Most partners cannot be booked on the website, so you wind up calling to add their flights to the reservation. But if you started by creating a reservation online, and you have a confirmation number, you’ll have no problem watching that reservation update on the Delta website as the agent works with it. That means as soon as it’s complete, you can finish off the transaction and issue tickets online, avoiding the telephone booking charge. Just make sure you issue tickets while you are still on the phone with the agent, in case the agent is unwilling to just put the reservation back on hold for you — you wouldn’t want them cancelling out all the work they just did for you.

• Principles for searching for award space.
  
  • When working with the Delta website to find availability, always specify that you are searching for a one-way award. You don’t want the website’s belief that there isn’t any ‘low’ award space on the return to cause it to tell you that the whole award isn’t available at the low level. Find each segment one at a time, it will tell you the price is the same as a low level award for a roundtrip but that’s fine — you’re just sussing out which flights have award space at the low level anyway, you’ll construct and book your award in an entirely separate search later.

    Say that you’re looking for transatlantic business class. Search just the international flight, one-way. Do this until you find a 100,000 mile one-way routing (Delta charges the same price for one-way as for roundtrip). Even if you’re searching coach, it’ll show you the 100,000 mile (double miles) coach seats and the 100,000 mile (‘low’ price) business seats. Now you’ve found seats that are available, note the flight times and flight number, you’re part-way to your award.

    Search each segment that way, for your outbound and for your return, until you’ve found the flights you want.

    Sometimes you can book this all, then, on the Delta website using their multi-segment search. Select the exact flights that were available when you looked up each flight. And enter each and every segment separately into the website.

  • Always search segment-by-segment. That means you need to know how to get where you are going, what the potential flights and routes there are. If you specify your starting city and your ending city, the computer on the other end will likely not search all possible permutations for you. And the fact that it finds no award space at the low level on a short domestic flight may cause it to tell you that no awards are available, which is misleading at best.

• Tools to use to search for award space.
  
  • Airfrance.us. Alitalia, Tarom, Kenya Airways, Aeromexico, Air Europa, China Southern, and Vietname Airlines (in addition to Delta, Air France, and KLM) can be searched on the Flying Blue website. Sign up for an account and you can search award space even without miles in your account. The ‘award calendar’ is actually pretty decent, when it shows award seats available they are available to Delta at the low level.

  • Expertflyer.com. This is a paid website and will assist with Aeroflot, Air Europa, Air France, Alaska, China Eastern, China Southern, Czech, GOL, Hawaiian, Malaysia (coach only), and TAROM.

  • V Australia awards can be searched by signing up for their frequent flyer program (you can’t use a US address when you do so). I find that once you identify awards at the low level through the V Australia program, and if you’re willing to call up enough Delta agents, eventually you’ll find one who can book it for you, albeit with fuel surcharges. Availability is pretty darned good, not as good as it once was, but still probably better than anyone else for North America-Australia non-stop and especially for the Los Angeles – Brisbane route.

  • Unfortunately there’s no way to search Korean Airlines awards online. The old Northwest website used to offer this feature, but that’s gone of course. You can’t even just sign up for a Korean Airlines account, because Korean requires you to have enough miles in your account to book an award before you can search for an award. Further, the space Korean offers its own members may not be the same as what Delta can book. Korean has a bunch of blackout dates, and Delta often thinks that Korean’s route-specific blackout dates apply systemwide (Although since the partner itself isn’t blacking out the seats, sometimes an agent will forget to check blackout dates and will ticket it anyway). You can call up Korean and ask about award space, I’ve had plenty of times where Korean said that two business class seats were available while Delta agents could see only one, but after grabbing the first seat a second would appear almost right away.

• There are unpublished and unpredictable routing rules. You can have both a stopover and an open jaw on international awards. The maximum number of segments permitted on an award is eight. They do enforce ‘maximum permitted mileage’ on some routes but not all and I don’t even know which ones, though I’ve frequently seen this intra-Asia. This means you don’t know up front whether something is allowed or it isn’t. So if an agent says no, is it because it’s really not allowed? Or because the agent was ill-informed? The approach here, though, is of course hang up, call back and if you can’t get the third or fourth agent to do it you probably aren’t going to be able to do it.

• Some partners and some routes have excellent availability.
  
  • Air France. In general their award availability is good, this is especially true for departures from the East Coast of the US, especially from cities which are not Delta hubs (the demand for those seats is very high). The challenge then is getting to the international gateway city. Though Air France is reducing their Airbus A380 frequency on Washington Dulles-Paris to four times weekly, there are two flights on the route and availability remains excellent, I’ve seen many times where there are as many as 9 business class award seats on a given flight. Availability beyond Paris to many destinations is quite good as well, though you cannot route a single award from the US via Paris to Asia.

  • Alaska Airlines. For members on the West Coast of the US this partner is the secret weapon. It gets you to Hawaii. And you can use it to fly to international gateway cities, this is especially useful since they have major operations in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Portland. So you can fly to Los Angeles on Alaska to grab a Korean Airlines flight, or fly to Portland and grab space on Delta’s Portland – Tokyo flight (one of the easier ones on which to get business class award space).

  • V Australia. That Los Angeles – Brisbane flight is excellent for securing business class seats to Australia, though at a cost of about $500 in taxes and fees.

  • Miami flights. I’ve had generally good luck finding space with Miami departures on Air France, Delta (London), KLM, Alitalia and Air Europa. New York flights too, especially Air France and Alitalia. Houston-Amsterdam on KLM used to be a gimme, but sadly they’ve pulled the Privatair all business class flight off the schedule so it’s no longer as good.

• Delta miles are, ironically enough, the very best for the two toughest frequent flyer awards there are. Those are business class awards to French Polynesia and Australia. French Polynesia, because Delta happens to partner with both airlines that fly from the mainland US direct to Tahiti (Air Tahiti Nui and Air France). Australia because of their V Australia partnership (don’t count on getting business class low level award space on Delta’s own Australia flight – hah!).

So there you have it. Delta miles are easy to earn, can be a challenge on the redemption side but they work well when you use the Air France Flying Blue website to find the award space, plan your award segment-by-segment, call back until you find a good agent, and spend your miles for business class awards on Air France, Air Europa, and V Australia especially. Viewed that way, it can be a perfectly lucrative program to spend time with.