Comments

1. No chart = no sale.
   Stop lying to us, Delta. Have you no shame?

2. “Huge! Award sale” I’m from MSP and that actually got me excited. I thought oh good, I might be able to cancel some WN less than ideal route awards and book some non stops. What do we get? MSP-MDW. Ha! I have a 10k r/t already booked this summer on WN to midway and I was hoping to relock lower as I thought that was a little much. And that’s with my wife along for free. But Delta? They throw on a “Huge!” Award sale promo and show a 777 taking me on my award booking. I’m sure they’ll use this at some presentation as how strong the program is and that award bookings are up.

3. Full disclosure; I worked 32 years at Delta.

   Are you willing to disclose the obvious deep seeded dislike you have for DL?

   I have no problem with you calling them out. What I resent is the number of times you take them over vs all others.

4. Jim, I think Delta is a great airline with a very disingenuous frequent flyer program. I think calling out their frequent flyer program is warranted more often than other programs. However they’re ahead in committing to faster inflight internet and I may need to start flying them more. (I do think I call out American, United, Alaska Airlines, and others when warranted.)

5. Delta & AA are the worst when it comes to mileage saver awards. Try getting an international first or business mileage saver award on either airline. I hope someone finds a way to sue them for their false and misleading advertising.

6. Jim, Gary – Southwest coined the word “transfarency” to describe the way they treat their customers. We need to coin a new word that means “the opposite of transfarency” to describe Delta. (In addition to their Skymiles hi-jinks, they are alone in refusing to allow ExpertFlyer and other services to display their fares and fare bucket availability to customers. So they are also deliberately hiding revenue fare information from the public.)

7. Gary,

   Delta has done tons of things that are dumb with Skymiles; hiding the award chart was the lowest moment of them.

   However, the value of the Skymile seems to have risen and can no longer be called a Skypesos. For example, I just redeemed for two tickets this summer to bring my aunt and uncle to my parents 50th anniversary from Sacramento to Fargo for 22.5K each round trip. That was way over 2 cpm for a domestic coach award. You couple that with the European biz class fare sales etc, you have a mileage currency on the rise.

   Now, if they’d quite hiding the award charts as they aren’t fooling anyone smart anyway…..

   I’d suggest an article on how the value of the SkyMile has risen despite the revenue based program.

8. It seems like DL’s award sales are for routes where the fares are low so another indication that mileage awards are revenue based. No way to have an award chart when the mileage required for every route is fare dependent.

9. People say that Delta miles are worthless. They are not. But how much are they really worth?
   Let’s use a real life example. I just bought a business class ticket from LAX to TLV on Delta, connecting at JFK. The cash price of the ticket was 2501$. Using miles, delta charges 275000 miles + $52.29. So, how much is a Delta mile worth?
   2501-52=2449=244900 cents.
   So, for 275000 miles you get a ticket worth 244900 cents
   Divide 244900cents/275000miles=0.89cents/mile
   So… Not totally worthless. But certainly less than what Delta sells their miles for.
   Just saying.

10. Gary

    I will give you the FF complaint. As a ticket/gate agent for all those years I heard all about what our program didn’t do. We used to laugh that DL never led the way on anything. We did run a top notch carrier (1968-2000) though. As an employee and now retiree, the FF policy never impacted me directly as I could ride anytime I wanted to. It does not surprise me that other programs are better