This article, the first in a planned series, deals with using delta.com, and other freely available resources to find low mileage awards, and will go step-by-step to show how one can find these awards, and successfully book them.
Although fairly common knowledge for most frequent fliers, it bears noting that Delta is a member of the SkyTeam Alliance, which means, in simple terms, it is possible to both earn and redeem mile on any airline that is also part of this alliance, which currently composes of 13 separate airlines, including Air France, and KLM operated flights. In addition, Delta partners with several other airlines for award tickets including Alaska Airlines.
All partner awards are considered low for the price of mileage, and thus are desirable if equivalent Delta flights are not easily found, or if one simply desires to try another airline's product. Partner awards are vital for getting the most bang for your buck so to speak. Delta's website is able to display partner awards for Alaska Airlines (AS), Air France (AF), KLM (KL), and of course Delta (DL). Unfortunately, due to a change in the award booking class for KLM, Delta will not show business class awards with KLM (if they do show up, they will be marked as KL.O for the booking class).
It should be made clear, especially those new to award redemption, that it is not always possible to get the most direct or most desirable routings at low mileage costs. I generally consider this an acceptable trade-off for being able to get the best possible return investment on my miles; others may disagree, and are willing to spend more miles for a medium or high award to get a more direct routing.
Having gotten those introductory facts out of the way, I feel a great way to start is to go step by step on attempting to get a relatively simple award booting from Portland, OR to Ljubljana, Slovenia in business class. In later parts, I'll go in depth on finding low premium award travel (its not as difficult as delta.com makes it seem) with partners.
Here's my search criteria:
* Origin: PDX
* Destination: CDG
* Class: Business (willing to fly coach on short domestic segments)
* Dates: April 2nd-April 9th
* Flexibility: starting travel +/- 2 days on either end if necessary
According to Delta's award chart, a first/business class award from US-EU round trip should cost 100,000 miles. Now, the question is, can we successfully find and book such a ticket?
For the sake of simplicity, and since we're simply started out on this guide, I will be limiting myself to Delta's website to book this award. Future guides will deal with how to find awards on other SkyTeam members.
To start out, its always best just to plug everything into the "Book a Trip" section on delta.com. Sometimes you just get lucky ...
To start out, its always best just to plug everything into the "Book a Trip" section on delta.com. Sometimes you just get lucky ...
This brings up the award calendar, which does not look promising
Right. So much for 100k, or so most people would say. As it turns out, the award calendar is simply dreadfully bad; it can't handle partner flights at all, and has a bad tendency to show rather strange routings. By manually inputting the desired routing, you can often find much better rewards. In addition, no partner flights will show up when searching by price, you MUST search by schedule to see them.
So far, nothing on Delta metal for the outbound has been specifically useful. Time to get creative. By searching various routings on skyteam.com, I know Air France flies their own metal ORD-CDG, and I know from previous experience that Alaska Airlines flies PDX-ORD. Since the hardest segment to find will be SFO-CDG, I decided to search for that first.
Since we only want to see availability on this route, we want to do a one-way award search from ORD-CDG on 4/2/10, searching by schedule so we see award flights.
SUCCESS!
Repeating a one-way search for PDX-ORD, I successfully found a flight on Alaska Airlines metal.
This gives us an outbound routing of
AS 686 PDX-ORD
AF 667 ORD-CDG
The rule of thumb is once you have found a desirable routing, search each segment one by one on the desired dates (making sure to increase the day by one after long-haul flights) until you find flights with the necessary availability.
Now, while I have done some extensive searching, there is no decent AF/AS/KL/DL awards on the 9th.. Using FlyingBlue (which will be covered in another blog posting), I did find AirFrance business availability on the 11th to LAX. Searching one way LAX-PDX by schedule shows no direct flights that we can connect to from AF 66 in first class, but a separate search does show their is some availability in coach.
Unfortunately, delta.com does NOT allow us to mix and match cabins directly (contrary to what their ads say); the best thing to do here is note down the flights we want, put the itinerary on hold, then call Delta to make the change.
Our return flights are now:
AF 066 CDG-LAX
AS 565 LAX-PDX (in coach).
* - I will be the first to admit that this problem is actually getting slightly better. Having looked for flights for this, I've actually seem some low TATL awards on reasonable dates. Its still not perfect, but more I saw more low awards than I have seen in the last year.
