Earlier I showed that Delta was charging more for some awards than their published maximum ‘level 5’ prices.
I gave the example of West Palm Beach – Honolulu. The award chart showed a maximum possible price of 90,000 miles each way in Delta’s premium cabin.
But I showed that itineraries were pricing at higher than 180,000 miles roundtrip. A reader had flagged a 235,000 mile price. I gave an example of 207,500.
Rather than reducing the price Delta was charging for these awards, they’ve changed the award chart.
They’ve added new higher pricing for their lie flat seats to Hawaii. Each Hawaii category now has two prices, whereas it had only one in the chart when I wrote the first post. In each category you will pay more for an internationally-configured (‘BusinessElite’) aircraft.
As Frequent Miler points out in the comments, Delta has charged extra for lie flat seats to Hawaii for some time.
- It is likely Delta just made a mistake and ‘forgot’ to publish pricing as high as 235,000 miles roundtrip for first class to Hawaii.
- They were sure quick on the ball with this change!
- Delta should refund the difference in points to anyone who actually make have spent more points than the published maximum price. Although hopefully no one actually did!
Delta is likely just correcting a mistake here, they ‘meant to’ and indeed programmed their computers to charge more miles for certain flights and they simply failed to reflect that in their published pricing.
So they’ve altered the award chart already, just one week into the new 2015 Delta Skymiles program… changing the award chart as though it hadn’t ever said anything different than what it does now.
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Tight, concise post. Interesting. Bravo.
Seems the only thing we can trust about The World’s Most Trusted Airline is that they can never be trusted.
This is one of my peeves of US programs. I know airfares are wonky and generally make no sense but more times than not the longer a route the more it will cost. A distance based mileage program accounts for the fact that an east coast to Hawaii flight is 2x as long as a west coast to Hawaii flight and should probably cost more (lie flat or not). We are sort of kidding ourselves that these should have all been priced the same to start but alas that was the way DL wrote their own rules. If only they could live by them.
5 stars on this post, and especially on its informative title.
A clear title is so much more respectful of us than “You won’t believe this one weird change at Delta” and similar nonsense.
How’s Frequent Miler’s side bet about your perception of Delta doing now?
Is it in the same trash can with The Points Guy’s excited “announcement” about non-existent 100K Amex offers?
Wow!!!! How surprised I am that Delta is doing something bad for its customers!!!!!!
Skypesos….
I’m sure with the price of oil falling so dramatically they will soon reduce the amount of miles needed for awards.
Delta should realize by now that some states have deceptive business practice statutes that are likely to be covered by this type of activity (and other Delta antics.)