Anyone who ever calls Delta, when you are done with the call, you get the request about cars and hotels. Also, as you can see from MY DELTA page, we also see the adds on our home page at Delta.

Now I am all for earning extra Skymiles and a discount on top of that would be great too as I am always looking to both earn more Skymiles and save a few bucks.

But when I looked to rent a car from Hertz in Sweden on this last trip, you can see that for a day rental the price was just a little high. But was it a good deal or not? So I went direct to Hertz to see.

Humm… Not seeing the BIG 15% discount Delta.com was promising here, but I would get a few extra Skymiles this way if I booked it so there is that, right?!

But you know what, Air France also has a deal going. They are saying I can save up to 24% off and when I use their link and code, as you can see from the above, the price DOES in fact drop a bunch. How nice and even a bigger car for the price (I also check other places like MouseSavers as well).

I would love to get feedback from readers if you have ever used the Delta codes and have found a good deal in both price and points due to the offer on the website. As for me, in the end I used my USAA discount and earned Hertz points and got a much better rate than any of the above. It does go to show that Delta.com links can be checked to see if they are worthwhile, but as most have found they are rarely the best deal to be had! – René

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I have been seeing this more and more as of late, that when I use my phone APP it shows me much higher on the upgrade list than Delta.com. That is, when I can get it going since it takes so long to start up as I blogged about and uploaded a video to YouTube of just how much time it takes HERE.

When I do check at the gate, the upgrade list with my phone app does match the gate display compared to when I log on to Delta.com with my laptop and compare the same list. Have you all been seeing the same thing on the I-Phone app vs. Delta.com or any other strange goings on at Delta.com? Let us know please.

Or maybe it is just something you don’t like about the updated Delta.com. For example, another thing that I wish they would change is the uber-tiny scroll bar on Delta.com (does it make you crazy too?)!

On a plus side, I can tell you with my first mileage run on the way as a Diamond Medallion, all 10 of my flights with 1st class have cleared (2 are CRJ200′s grrrrr) compared to my mileage run last year as a Silver Medallion (FO)  when just 1 of the 8 cleared pre-flight! So I guess now all I need is an FO to carry my bags (hello! MJ?) and is it wrong to tease and have my old FO tag on my backpack? – René

PS – Don’t forget about SWAG Saturday
starting at 3:PM!

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There is some more good news out today from Delta. You can now buy e-Gift cards online. You can buy them up to $1000 each and they can ONLY be used on Delta and Delta code share flights. You can also use up to 3 per ticket but with conditions. It says:

“A maximum of three forms of payment (including Certificates or Cards) can be applied towards a single ticket. Certificates and Cards cannot be used in conjunction with any other certificate, voucher or credit towards a single ticket.”

So, say you have 3 – $500 e-Cards but your ticket is $2000. Then, you would have to use 2 of them and your credit card for the rest. Clear? All the T&C are on the Delta site or you see a text copy of them here.

There is another HUGE win for those who use the (NON-DELTA) American Express Platinum Card as it will let you get $200 credit per year for Delta related items, like food or bag fees, once you register that you want Delta to be your credit for the year (see the Terms, Conditions & Disclosures at link above) . Most are saying any fees and charges from Delta are being credited. I see no reason it will not be the same for these, but I have not tested it yet. Assuming it works, look what you could get in less than one year for the card fee:

• $200 e-Gift this year

• $200 e-Gift after Jan 1st next year

• $100 GOES credit back when paid with card

• Gold SPG status

• Skyclub and other lounge access

… and so many more perks as well!

Without question this will be the next AMEX card I go for and will likely be a long term keeper for me. So I welcome the addition of e-Gift cards to Delta; nice to see some good news! – René
 

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This week, with a HT to reader “Sean”, is all about the best way to book a ticket to fly on Delta Air Lines. This also comes with a word of caution. What caution? Delta wants you to [start] booking everything on Delta.com, and even offers a “best rate guarantee” yes the “best price on the web” and this will also ensure you get full credit for your flight. You see, other sites, could, maybe, dump you into the “consolidator” fare group that does not give full credit for booking from them.

Now all these types are NOT created equal. Take  ITA Software  or  Kayak  for example. Both of these simply “scrape” data from Delta.com and display them to you. ITA will not let you then transfer to Delta.com, you must do that yourself. But, Kayak.com, does let you dump over to Delta.

You may be saying to yourself, all of this is interesting but who really cares. Delta.com makes it very simple to book a ticket on their website. All I do is plug in the dates, if I want coach or business or even if I want a specific fare class (i.e. at least this high or higher please).

Here is why I beg you, for now, to never ever do this ever again. Please. Because if you do this, you could be paying the exact same price to fly in coach as you could have to fly in first or business class! Seriously! Or, even worse, you may pay MORE to fly in coach when you could have flown in first (at least part of the trip). Let’s look at a real world example. Last weekend you wanted to fly from Washington to Florida. So you jump on Delta.com to search:

Delta.com does it’s thing and starts to look for the “best fare” under the conditions you have picked.

And what did Delta.com find you for you after this very simple search for the cheapest economy fare seat for your trip?

OK, well, I did this search last week, and only a few days before the flights, so I guess we can all understand that the cost to buy the ticket should be high. Right? Well what if we jump on Kayak.com and search for seats. What will it show?

Well. This is a much lower rate. And not just by a little bit. I have a bunch of choices and if I pick them they will send me over to Delta.com and just fill in the flights Kayak.com has picked for me. Let’s see what happens next:

I hope you have seen what has just happened as it is the entire point of today’s post and why, for now, you should NEVER EVER start your booking at Delta.com. As you can clearly see, not only is the price much lower, but I am flying coach on the outbound part of the trip, and first class on the return part of the trip. In fact, the flights may not even show up on the Delta.com search at all since the only seats open on the flight are in first, and you have asked Delta.com not to search for first class. Note if you try to work around this, by selecting a minimum fare class, Delta.com may give you the choice of coach or business, but not always.

You see Delta.com does not allow you to mix and match your search in this way, that is coach one way and first the other way. Nor will Delta.com try to find the best “deal” for you that is the best price and the best cabin for the best price. The search engine is not yet designed that way and who knows how long, if ever, it will change to do what Kayak and ITA does automatically.

I hope today’s post has been an eye opening post for you. Many readers commonly use other booking sites to get bonus points by starting at these sites and I encourage you to test these out as well. At this point, any site, other than Delta.com, is the one to start your booking with (with caution) and lastly, if you want 3x points for each ticket you do buy, then you should be paying for them with your AMEX GOLD Premier Membership Rewards card or the Business GOLD Membership Rewards Card 50,000 point card! – René
 

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When ever I sit down to write a post, I always try to think of how I can instruct. I think about how I can improve your knowledge about Delta & how knowledge of the rules can help you when you need it.

I harp a ton about the “mighty schedule change rule” when it comes to award tickets and getting what you want. The same can also apply equally to tickets you have paid for.

I also, almost each day, get a question about if Gold Medallion is really that much better than Silver or if Platinum is that much better than Gold. I have been told, Diamond is the cat’s meow and I cannot wait to find out. Gold really is so much better because it is the first level where Delta “loves you” and you can see that with the perks you get. Platinum is a whole new world above that.

Time for the teaching part. On my next May mileage run to LAX I had a massive time change on my very last flight landing me 2+ hours after my scheduled time. With more than 1 hr I could go so far as to ask to cancel my ticket and get a refund. Now I only paid $202 all in for the ticket  so I DID NOT want to do that. But, I could also tinker for free with the flights and choices. I pulled up all the possible flights that would take me from LAX to MKE. One of them was LAX-JFK-MKE. This one would add a bunch of MQM’s and RDM’s to my trip. Due to the major schedule change, I was able to change to my requested flights at no charge. I went from 5094 MQM’s & 10188 RDM’s to 5835 MQM’s & 11670 RDM’s pushing my MQM cost down from 4CPM to 3.5CPM!

The best part of all of this is that this will fix a MAJOR mistake in math I had made. I will be at a blog conference in mid-May and when I was scheduled to land in SBN after the event, I would have been at 124,977 MQM’s. How bad was that? Now, I will be over 125k and earn my Diamond status. The only “funny” thing is my first flight after 125k BIS (butt-in-seat miles) will be on a CRJ with no 1st class from ATL-SBN! Ah well.

So, please take from this the value of understanding the rules. The value of looking at what you can do BEFORE you fly. The perks you can get and ask for when you are an elite with Delta! – René

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This week Delta rolled out some “new” fare class codes to align them better with our Skyteam partners. At this point, there is nothing “scary” about these codes other than designation and we have an even larger alphabet soup of fare codes to keep in our heads.

We also know how broken the award booking part of Delta.com is, but there are just some things that should work and work really well. Like booking and buying a ticket should be one of the things that just works and works perfectly. Delta has had issues in the past about one fare class being shown when you are NOT logged in and yet another when you ARE logged in, but it would change when you went to buy and that has been fixed and is not what I ran into. As you can see, Delta.com clearly says there are seats for me to buy. But when I go to buy:

They are gone and it appears that Delta has also logged me OUT of the system. So I go back to my Delta start page, am now still logged in, look again, and the seats are for sale again. Try again. Same results.

Then I decided to try to buy the tickets with the handy dandy Delta phone APP. As you can see from the above, it also showed there were seats to buy, but errored out at the last step! Grrrrr. So I am forced to call the Platinum Medallion line and the rep finds in her system a slightly higher price than Delta.com and the Phone APP showed and thus the reason I could not buy!

I also got interested in the San Francisco Skyclub as I will be spending some time there. What is it like and what amenities does it have?

I have often been instructed by CORP people to ALWAYS tell my readers to make sure I get the right answer, to search on Delta.com to make sure I get the right and up to date answer.

But as you can see when I go to do just that, the page is not there. Two of the three links did not, in fact, work at all.

Many of you have given your feedback of what you think of the new Delta.com home page. There is much I do like, but even more I do NOT like. It is painfully slow and those darn spinning icon globes make me angry each time I stare at them for what seems like hours. I am also not a fan of the list of my flights. Sometimes Delta just changes them and I have no idea what the total schedule change was and must go back and look at the original booking.

Rant over for today but I want to know, has your opinion of the new Delta.com changed at all since it came out? Are there bits you like? – René

PS – don’t miss out on a chance to WIN
a Samsung TAB – ends TONIGHT!

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A few weeks back I had a rookie post about all the “fun” things you can ask a Delta rep for; some of them they are mostly happy to do while others not so much.

In that light, here are a few more fun things to try for when booking a ticket, especially with Delta partners, that you can ask a rep to do if you are having a hard time getting your seats. Keep in mind a good rep will often say they have already thought of that or some will challenge you how much work that is or that never works or I have never ever had that work before (all of these are KEY WORDS for you to say thanks so much for your help and CLICK – next phone rep)!

1) The first is when there seems to be space but the rep can not get the seats. You can ask the rep to manually request with say KLM the “O” (if you want low level biz) class service and see if they will confirm back the space.

2) Similar to point one is you can ask the rep to try to LONG SELL the itinerary and see if the computer will answer back that you are confirmed.

3) I touched on this last time but they can try to reach out to revenue management to override the space available and give you the seats for that segment. They hate to do this and you may have more success with the international reissue desk and their supervisors to get this done.

4) Having issues where they want to “marry” segments and don’t want to adjust them, I have had good success asking them to simply request it to price as booked. This is one computer rule that is NOT set in stone and just a way to make you go away!

5) Sometimes, linking to point #4, you can have issues when say working on changing part of a trip. Sometimes just ONE segment is mid or high while all the others are low. Maybe they can just give you and “Even Exchange” for the low ones you now have. This often requires a supervisor to get involved.

I could go on and on as there really are so many ways to try to get what you want when Delta is not playing nice and finding all the space you want. But the one thing all this should teach us is that all the rules are not rules. When just about anything can be changed, if a rep just wants to, we can see how fluid Delta can be. – René

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Today I am flying to Istanbul so say “hi” if you see me in a Skyclub/Crown Room/AF Lounge/Millennium Club or on a flight. Also today, you should have already synced your SPG & Delta info as today the program “officially” kicks off (but most of us got started on Wednesday when SPG.com let us start to register).

While I was in admiring my newly linked and updated info on Delta.com, I noticed something I had not seen or checked recently but would be good to have current when flying off to Europe. Delta had again dumped my passport info out of Delta.com so I clicked on it to update.

After checking all the fields and numbers I saved and it seems to be holding now. While you are doing this, be sure if you have a TSA Pre / Known / Trusted Traveler number you check that is where it should be as well.

Lastly, why not check to see if there are any promotions you have as of now not yet registered for. Even if you think you will NEVER fly them, you just never know when the perfect mileage run will pop up and you can score some extra points!

Fly safe everyone – René

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Think about this, we are 10 month away from 2014 and the start of MQD’s (I know it is Monday and I just made it much worse sorry)! So what are some things to think about before Friday? As my fellow BA blogger Pointmetotheplane touched on Sunday, you need to make sure if you are a PM+ you have picked your 2012 choice benefits.

Just to make your head hurt, so you get this, let me explain it. Back in the “day” you could get a perk the year you earned your status and for the NEXT YEAR when you flew your status. So, you got a double. That is no longer the case. Now the rules are this (and please hang with me).

During in 2011, if you earned PM or DM status, you earned your status for the REST of 2011 plus you also earned your medallion benefit for 2012. Clear so far? You have until the last day of FEB2013 to redeem your 2012 choice benefit that is BEFORE the 01MARCH2013. Think about what you take. If you gift someone status, they will have it, for uh, a few days! So please DO NOT pick that one at this point. Pick one of the others like Skymiles etc.

Now, if you earned your status last year, in 2012, for the 2013 Skymiles year, you have until NEXT FEB2014 to spend it. Clear?

Next, if you are about to LOSE your status and drop to NOTHING, please be sure to check all your seats. Exit row, EC, you name it, even if PAST 01MARCH, they “should” hold if there is no equipment change in say March or April etc. You will NOT get any upgrades or priority boarding but your seat should be OK. Worst case, if it does change, plead the case to DeltaAssist and hope. Better to try to lock in NOW.

Other bits. Some may have American Airlines points that are about to expire 01MARCH. Procrastination will cost you, so worst case, buy 1000 points as they post fast and you will keep them from expiring! $30 is a HUGE cost for 1000 points but better than the cost and the fight to get them back AT THIS POINT!

There may be other programs that expire soon and this would be a good time to check. From shopping portals to other ways there are so many ways to make sure this does not affect you. As Delta flyers, we all love the fact that our points NEVER expire (keep in mind Skybonus points DO expire so check them too) – René

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I want to make this an informative post rather than just the babbling rant that I feel like posting. I hate RAP music. I am the generation before RAP. I find all RAP the same and all of it irritating. I harken back to all things 80′s and thus, when I spend enough time on Delta.dumb, I yearn for the simple days of NWA.com for booking.

Mini rant over. What am I talking about today? I am looking forward to my 2 day mileage run I booked from PHX. I will have to reposition. So how will I get to PHX from SBN? Well I can use my FlexPerks FlexPoints to just buy a ticket for almost free after points (one of the reasons I got the card) but for now I locked in and used Skymiles. However, I could only find low level seats from GRR (Grand Rapids 2 hrs away) as opposed to my preferred SBN (South Bend 40 min away). I booked FF tickets knowing as a Platinum Medallion with Delta I can change my frequent flyer seats as much as I want up to 72 hrs before flight. I also did the smart thing by searching from SBN-PHX, one way, and the same for the way back, so I could get the real picture of the award seats availability. All were 40k round trip. Ugg!

But here is where my head just about exploded the other day and an answer to why when you get in touch with a good Delta rep, they can seemingly do things we can not. They, with the speed and grace of a gazelle, search each tiny segment by segment to get what you want. For example, not just SBN-MSP, but maybe SBN-DTW-MSP or SBN-ATL-MSP. They look at each bit to see if low level will pop up and then they hold that and move on to the next part. Then, at long last, they ask the computer to “price” what they have done and to see if it will all go low level.

Back to me. I looked again and again SBN-PHX and PHX-SBN, one way, round trip, all of it. Nothing but 40k. Then, for grins, I check just one way from SBN-DTW and a low level flight was there. Really? I checked the return date routed through MSP-SBN, also 25k! Really? These are most of the times the ones that bust me at low level booking. I then quickly looked at all the other legs I had connecting from GRR. I added those with the multi-leg search at Delta.dumb and then asked for a total after picking the flights one by one. BINGO and booked and done! (you see, Delta.dumb, when I just searched from point A-B, did not pick all these same flights one way or round trip).

What you should take from this is to NEVER EVER trust what Delta.dumb is telling you. It will NOT try to find you the best price. You must work work work to see where each little low level leg is. Save the flight number and time, then try to plug them in to get what you want and hope it will price right. If not, go back and see what segment is breaking the trip. If this is not clear feel free to ask questions on the blog as others may want the same answers as you!

I love my Delta but I hate my new Delta.dumb! The new graphics are so slow I could go to the bathroom (with a book) while it loads; the search function, well, I guess I will just put on some nice tunes from the 80′s and dream of the good old NWA days gone by! – René

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