Comments

1. Maybe the greatest thing about your blog is your willingness to share your honest criticisms (or praise) based on your expertise. Keep it up. Your strong opinions help me focus on the most valuable programs. I have a few thousand Delta miles, probably enough for a Cosmo subscription.

2. Don’t have any interest in Delta flights at all. They make it too hard to plan and find award trips and the points needed for a trip. I refuse to fly Delta for this reason. I won’t even fly them when they have sales on their prices for any tkts. It helps that I don’t live in a Delta hub. I looked up 2 different prices in the last 6 mos and both could be found on United & American at cheaper amounts. One was about $100 and the other was about $140. Might just be my trip locations, but I don’t need Delta and to me they just do not exist as a flt option.

3. Gary,
   Since Delta is now “revenue based” it seems like the pendulum is swinging the other way. We now have discounted “revenue based” awards due to lack of usage of mileage tickets. The only problem is there may be not much out there in the way of frequent traveler miles to buy these mileage tickets.
   Given the opacity of how Delta deals with its mileage flyers how do they intend to establish a stable revenue flow selling miles when they need to sell miles in times of bad business or a more competitive environment due to lower oil prices? Do people actually apply and get Delta Skymiles credit card these days and try to earn miles on spend given this type of mileage program environment that Delta is now practising?
   Since they will not get a significant cash flow selling miles my guess is you will see this in their revenue ticket pricing which they have to discount which is a more direct hit on their financials and sales.
   If you go “revenue based” on your mileage plan I believe you are actually putting your financial “eggs” in one basket. So in times or bad business both your ticket sales and mileage sales will bleed.
   This is probably different than in the past when mileage programs would be a natural “hedge” in terms of providing a more stable cash flow in bad times vis a vis the airline’s ticket sales.

   I hope American Airlines sees this clearly with Delta and not go this path.

4. Actually, the 105k miles is available for less than 7 day stays, and is very often available. A SALE is more like the 87,500 they had last month for the Spring. I got excited when I read there was a Summer sale, so I started looking around and had no problem at all finding 105k prices to almost everywhere, and a few 95k as well. Alas, nothing good to places I want to go (I’m really looking for under 100k for a “sale”).

5. Less than 18 months ago I redeemed for two business class awards ATL-STU-CDG-ATL on DL & AF for 125K each. How is 210K each now a good deal? An old athletic coach once told me, after what I thought was a stellar performance, “you’re only good by comparison.” The current comparison for me is two business class tickets booked 2/16 for Fall travel ATL-DOH-SIN, then HKG-JFK, LGA-ATL. With my two year focus on AA I easily had the 295K required amount (inc. 10K kicked back from the Citi card/cards) for QR, CX and AA, and that’s being ATL based! I’ve been doing this for awhile with most FF enrollments beginning in 1981. Does anybody recall that Delta originally had a business class award, requiring round trip U.S.-Europe travel for two at 150K. Apples and oranges to a degree but there’s another comparison.

6. Say whatever bad you want about Delta but this is a decent sale, especially for summer travel to Europe. But then I’m hub bound, a DL sale like this makes it MUCH more appealing to me…non-stop on DL or at least one stop on anyone else. Might just have to swing a trip this summer…