Not to offend anyone, but I have a new favorite blog reader, and his name is Mac. He was the genius that pointed out the possibility of redeeming British Airways Avios points for travel on Aer Lingus in order to avoid fuel surcharges. Mysteriously Aer Lingus opened up business class award space on just about every flight the following day, and I’m still not sure whether that was a glitch or not.

Well, today Mac brings us another excellent observation on the “Ask Lucky” page of the blog, which I’ll break down here. Though in the meantime I think I owe Mac a steak dinner, and should really rename the “Ask Lucky” page to “Words of Wisdom from Mac” page.

Anyway, today’s discovery by Mac involves Delta SkyMiles. If you’re at all familiar with the program you’ve probably heard them referred to as SkyPesos before, and that’s for good reason — their redemption rates are ridiculous. That’s at least true if you’re trying to actually redeem miles for Delta flights. If you redeem on their partner airlines it’s not all bad news.

They partner with Air France to Europe, and they release a good amount of business class award space, which can easily be searched online. To Asia they partner with Korean Air, which also releases a good amount of award space. The challenge with Korean Air is that they don’t display business class award space online and they have a ton of blackout dates. For a while they displayed business class award space on ExpertFlyer, but unfortunately they stopped doing that. After all, knowledge is power, and the last thing Delta wants is for their consumers to have the power to redeem miles for flights at a reasonable level. Now the only way to book Korean Air awards is by calling up Delta SkyMiles, which is more or less a lost cause (“Korean Air, I ain’t never heard of them before!”).

But the one destination that has been a complete lost cause is South America. Delta doesn’t have any major partner airlines flying between the US and South America, and it’s very rare to find “low” level award space on Delta to South America, meaning you’re usually paying a minimum of 200,000 SkyMiles for roundtrip business class.

But there’s another option that’s actually very attractive, that can almost always get you saver business class award space to South America. Aeromexico partners with Delta, and they have a pretty good route network to South America. Before we get into the details of the strategy, let’s discuss the basics.

Aeromexico South America destinations and frequencies

Aermemexico operates the following nonstop flights out of their Mexico City hub to South America:

• Bogota daily on a 737
• Buenos Aires daily on a 767
• Lima daily on a 737
• Santiago 6x weekly on a 767
• Sao Paulo daily on a 777

Aeromexico’s business class product

On their longhaul flights (those destinations served be 767s and 777s) Aeromexico seems to have a pretty competitive business class product. You can read more about it here. While it’s not fully flat it does appear to be pretty comfortable, so I wouldn’t hesitate to fly it.

Finding award availability on Aeromexico

While you can book Aeromexico awards on delta.com (which is a fairly new feature) the best place to search for availability is on Air France’s website. You’ll need to be a member of their Flying Blue program first. Once you’re logged into your account you can click on the “Award Tickets” tab on the main page.

Once you click on that you’ll be redirected to the award search page. The key to finding Aeromexico availability is to search segment-by-segment. I’ll show you how to search for availability from the US to Mexico City later, though for now we’re just focusing on finding the longhaul award space.

Let’s assume you want to fly from Mexico City to Buenos Aires. Just enter the origin, destination, and class of service, and click on “Search.”

The results page will bring you a calendar view of the award space at the saver level. As you’ll see, award space is spectacular. I chose random dates in September, figuring it’s neither low season nor high season in South America, and got the following results:

As you can see, on the outbound from Mexico City to Buenos Aires, 19 of the 35 days on the calendar have business class award availability:

And on the return, 34 of the 35 days on the calendar have business class award availability:

And for a slight reality check of just how great that is, let’s check in with Delta for the same time period between Atlanta and Buenos Aires:

The “low” level awards are shaded green. As you can see, they only have two dates for the same time period on the outbound, and five dates on the return (and frankly, that availability is shockingly good for Delta).

Anyway, back to the Air France search tool. Once you’ve selected your preferred dates just click “Next, select flight,” and you’ll be brought to the results page. I selected September 8-15.

Not surprisingly the results page shows us the nonstop Aeromexico flights in business class:

So now you’re done with the Air France website. You can apply the same strategy to searching for any of Aeromexico’s other destinations in South America. Now it’s time to get to Mexico City.

Getting to Mexico City

There are a couple of ways to get to Mexico City. One way is on Delta, where you’re faced with the same issues you always are with Delta — they just don’t release a whole lot of award space at the “low” level. But Delta also partners with Alaska Airlines, so you can instead fly them from Los Angeles to Mexico City, and they release a ton of first class award space.

Alaska Airlines has twice daily nonstop service out of Los Angeles to Mexico City, and has connections from many other cities to LA. The easiest way to search Alaska Airlines award space is either on alaskaairlines.com or ExpertFlyer. Since alaskaairlines.com is the free option that doesn’t require membership, let’s use that.

To search award availability just go to their award search page.

Just enter the origin, destination, dates, and be sure the boxes for “Award Reservations” and “Award Calendar” are checked.

The next page will bring you a calendar display. If you see a cost of 32,500 miles each way for first class, that’s the saver level, which should be bookable through Delta as well.

After you have your dates selected you can click “Continue,” which will show you the flights with availability.

Based on the flights I’m trying to connect to, the third option would work best for me, and now I know it’s available at the saver level.

One other option — flying Aeromexico to Mexico City

It’s also worth noting that Aeromexico serves many destinations in the US, including Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and more. They also release a decent amount of award space on their flights, so using the same method outlined above, you can search for their award space from the US using the Air France website as well. You can either search segment-by-segment to get the most accurate results (in other words, search availability from your US gateway separately from availability between Mexico City and South America), or you can search them all at once if you want to get the quickest results.

So you could instead search New York to Buenos Aires all at once, as follows:

As you can see it won’t return as many results. For the same outbound you only see three dates available:

While for the return you see 15 dates available:

If you select dates you’ll notice that the connections work out quite nicely:

Hey, options are always a good thing…

Putting it all together

Let’s recap, We know the Aeromexico flights are available at the saver level, and we also know the Alaska Airlines flights are available at the saver level. We used the individual airlines’ websites to search for the space even though delta.com will display their award space as well. The difference is that the above sites allow you to search for award availability off of a calendar, which opens up lots of options. But now that we know which flights we want, we’ll go to delta.com to actually make the booking. Let’s say we prefer the Alaska Airlines flights out of LAX over the Aeromexico flights out of New York.

Once on delta.com click on “SkyMiles” and then “Use Miles.” Then click on the first tab for “Award Ticket Reservations.”

Once you’re on the next page you’re going to want to click on the “Multi-city” tab. Why? Because if you just search flights between Los Angeles and Buenos Aires, delta.com will only present you with options that are more direct on Delta, which will likely cost double the cost (or more). By searching segment-by-segment we’ll be forcing them to give us the options we want.

Once you click “FIND FLIGHTS” you’ll be given options for each individual segment, so just pick the flights we chose above.

First from Los Angeles to Mexico City:

Then from Mexico City to Buenos Aires:

Then from Buenos Aires to Mexico City:

And then from Mexico City to Los Angeles:

Once you’ve selected each individual flight you’ll be brought to the results page, where you’ll see the low level cost of 100,000 Delta SkyMiles plus $66.95 in taxes.

And just to prove it actually works, here’s the above routing out of New York on Aeromexico the whole way priced out as well:

As a reminder, Delta allows one stopover and one open jaw on an award ticket. So if you want to stopover in Buenos Aires and/or fly out of one city in the US and return to another, you can do that on a SkyMiles award.

Anyway, hopefully some of you guys find this helpful. If you have any questions, please let me know! And a big thanks to Mac for bringing this to my attention!

A few days ago I posted about some of the great business class fares American and United were offering between select cities in the US (Dallas, St. Louis, and Miami in particular) and China (Shanghai/Beijing). I shared my reasoning for why I’m very tempted by the fares in the previous post, so check it out.

I figured the fare would be pulled in no time, but that’s not the case. Instead, not only has Delta matched the fares, but they’ve been extended to include Tokyo, all for about $2,100 including tax.

As you can see here, several airlines are competing between Miami and Shanghai:

United, Delta, and American are all in!

As a reminder, these fares are good for travel through May 15, with a seven day advance purchase, as well as three day minimum stay and 30 day maximum stay.

Delta and American have a similar fare between Miami and Tokyo, except there’s not even a minimum stay requirement on the Delta fare (though there is a three day minimum stay requirement on the American fare):

So based on the research I’ve done, I see ~$2,100 fares for the following city/airline pairs:

Out of Miami:

• American and Delta to Tokyo
• American, Delta, and United to Shanghai
• American, Delta, and United to Beijing

Out of St. Louis:

• Delta to Tokyo
• American, Delta, and United to Shanghai
• American, Delta, and United to Beijing

Out of Dallas:

• Delta to Tokyo
• Delta and United to Shanghai
• Delta and United to Beijing

If anyone comes across others, please let me know in the comments below!

We’ve seen US airlines unbundle their services for a while now, from checked bag fees to standby fees to premium seating fees.

However, Delta is taking it a step further with their new “Basic Economy” fares, which are available in select markets.

The first thing that’s unique about these fares is that they’re non-refundable and non-changeable. That means you can’t even pay a fee to change the flights, so if your plans change you forfeit the ticket entirely.

But the more interesting thing is that advance seat assignments aren’t permitted, even for elite members. This is an interesting development since previously elite members (in particular top tier elites) were more or less excluded from the “unbundling.” Yet in this case even a Delta Diamond can’t get advance seating when booking one of these “Basic Economy” fares (which book into the “E” fare class).

What’s interesting to me is that these fares are still eligible for mileage accrual, and as far as I can tell, also eligible for upgrades. So I find it rather odd that in creating these “Basic Economy” fares they’re only getting rid of seat assignments and the ability to change a ticket.

But I think this is the beginning of a trend we’ll see in the airline industry where they take even more perks out of the lowest fares. Previously the flying experience was “unbundled” regardless of what kind of a non-full fare ticket you booked, while now they’re starting to differentiate between discounted coach fares. I suspect we’ll see other airlines follow, and in turn more things taken away, including mileage accrual and the ability to upgrade. And let’s be honest with ourselves, it’s not like they’re lowering fares to offer you a more basic ticket without the perks. Rather, you’re paying the same fare you previously would have and are getting less. But I guess that’s the story of the US airline industry.

It’s not often that I learn something new about award tickets, though my friend Chris pointed this out to me not too long ago and it came as a surprise. I was about to make a bet with him since I was convinced he was wrong, though I learned from my last mistake.

Anyway, what I hadn’t realized was that Delta actually allows stopovers on domestic award tickets, which no other major US frequent flyer program allows to the best of my knowledge. Admittedly even after learning this information I really don’t care, since finding domestic Delta award space at the “low” level is virtually impossible. Hell, it took me nearly half an hour to put together a totally arbitrary example that would work, simply because there isn’t any domestic “low” level award space.

That being said, as long as the city you’re stopping over in is a legal connecting point between your origin and destination and has the desired level of award space, it should be fairly easy to incorporate the stopover.

For example, I looked at a flight from Tampa to Los Angeles with a stopover in Detroit on the way. After finding low level award space on each individual segment, I typed them all into the award search tool using the “Multi-city” function.

Sure enough when I selected all the flights, the entire trip cost only 25,000 miles.

Again, for 90% of us this is more valuable in theory than in practice. Still, it’s something to keep in mind…

A month ago I wrote about a change which I considered to be the greatest improvement to the Delta SkyMiles program in years. The change was that Expert Flyer started displaying business class award space for travel on Korean Air. If you’re familiar with Delta SkyMiles you probably know that the best way to redeem SkyMiles is for travel on their partner airlines, including Air France and Korean Air. Air France is a great option, as they’re good about releasing award space and it’s easy to search award space online.

Korean Air is a bit trickier, though still incredibly useful, at least in theory. They have tons of destinations in the US and are great about releasing award space. There are just two problems. The first, more minor problem, is that they have blackout dates. The second, bigger problem, is that it wasn’t possible to search Korean Air award space online, and you had to put yourself at the mercy of SkyMiles agents. As I’ve written about many times before, SkyMiles agents are absolutely the most clueless agents in the industry. Even when the inventory is known to be available, it can take several calls to get an agent that can actually “see” the flight.

This is why I was overjoyed by the change. I could find the space that I knew to be there and then call up Delta to book it. Now, it still wasn’t an easy task. On one occasion I tried to book a ticket for travel on Korean Air and had to call 11 times (!!!) before I got an agent that saw the space, and that’s after waiting on hold for 10 minutes each time as the agent requested the space. But still, the “game” of booking award tickets on Korean Air went from a wild guessing game to a game of “hang up and call again.”

Suffice it to say I was rather sad to see this disclaimer today on Expert Flyer:

So it appears it’s no longer possible to search Korean Air award availability on Expert Flyer, with the exception of intra-Asia flights. This does make me wonder, though, was this Delta or Korean Air’s doing?

And with this change SkyMiles depreciated just as quickly as they appreciated last month. They’re once again more or less useless for travel to Asia, while still quite useful for travel to Europe on Air France.