Delta’s SkyMiles Outrage: 425,000 Points for an Empty Business Class Seat—Other Flyers Pay Only 90,000! – View from the Wing

Delta’s SkyMiles Outrage: 425,000 Points for an Empty Business Class Seat—Other Flyers Pay Only 90,000!

by Gary Leff on August 27, 2024

Delta will charge you 425,000 SkyMiles one-way Atlanta to Santiago, Chile in business class on April 17th.

This isn’t a peak day. This isn’t a day where the flight is full. It’s a day where they’re looking to unload business class seats cheap. All of their inventory is wide open to sell their cheapest fares.

Not a single seat is currently reserved in the business class cabin.

And Delta will happily make award space on this flight available to its partners. So if you’re an Air France KLM Flying Blue member, the same flight that Delta charges 425,000 miles to SkyMiles members can be booked for just 90,000 Flying Blue points.

Delta charges its own members 4.7 times the miles that Air France frequent flyers pay for the same Delta flight. Delta does not offer a lot of saver awards on its flights in business class. But when it does, these seats can be booked at a reasonable cost by frequent flyers all over the world – as long as they are not trying to use Delta’s own miles.

Let’s not forget that the Vice President in charge of Delta SkyMiles says they don’t even need to try to offer strong redemption value (“we are not necessarily trying to play the game with customers”) customers keep earning miles and taking their credit card even though they intentionally offer poor value to members.

The good news is that unless you’re hub captive to Delta, you may not care about SkyMiles status. And if you’re not letting SkyMiles status trump the value of the points you’re collecting, it’s easy to earn better miles than the loyalty trash coming out of Atlanta even if you want to spend your miles to fly Delta.

Fortunately, Air France KLM’s Flying Blue is a partner of all the major transferable currencies (Chase, American Express, Citibank, Capital One, Wells Fargo, Bilt). That makes it easy to build up a balance with Air France to redeem these flights – and you don’t have to commit to them until you’re ready to book.

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