Delta is pretty good about letting you book travel on their partner airlines online. Awards on almost all SkyMiles partners can be booked through delta.com, though the search functionality as such isn’t great. Delta.com constantly returns error messages when searching award availability and the pricing often doesn’t make sense (and since Delta doesn’t publish award costs, there’s no easy way to get incorrect pricing fixed).
While it’s common for airlines to have temporary outages when it comes to searching and booking tickets online, delta.com has been having some serious issues the past couple of days. Since Friday afternoon (eastern time) delta.com hasn’t displayed any partner award availability. We’re not just talking about some partners, but rather none of their partners are bookable online.
While I’m told Delta is aware of this, it has now been over 60 hours since the issue first happened, and it’s still not fixed.
With any other airline I’d be annoyed by an outage lasting for so long, but in the case of Delta I’m just hoping that this isn’t part of a significant IT “upgrade” that’s leading to their next “enhancement.”
Anyway, I’m writing about this because I’ve received several messages from readers about the outage. You’re not alone in not seeing any Delta partner award availability online, and hopefully it’s resolved soon. Nearly three days is a long time for an outage for such a big program. I’m just hoping there aren’t bigger implications here.
In the meantime partner awards should still be bookable as usual by phone, and Delta doesn’t charge phone ticketing fees for awards.
old post but how come no ones been reporting on this. Chinese partner awards went up nearly 200-300% in cost....
I was working on flights in Argentina today and kept getting that error message. A couple of times it just showed ###### in place of airport codes. Also, the box that you check to select "all delta partners" was gone. Annoying.
Uhm it's back but they may have devalued. TPE-LAX in business direct with China Airlines is now coming up at 125,000 MILES!!!! It was recently upped from 80k to 95k. I can see TPE-LAX in mixed business/economy for China Airlines and Westjet for 95k though still. Screw this shit.
When they removed the award charts, at first they claimed it was a technical glitch that would soon be fixed....
Finally someone is reporting on this. I have experienced this issue since September. For me, it seems the award availability is not displaying on internet but sometimes shows up on my phone app. I send an message to the Point Guy on 12th Sep but thought it was just me..... Thanks lucky to bring it up!
And the same situation is happening in LIFEMILES, in which program, after the new search tool, you can't find anymore, at least, ASIANA, THAI AIRWAYS and EVA awards.
The partner award search is broken for a couple of months now. Sometimes you could only find flights by searching a Delta flight first, sometimes awards would only be displayed once you search the same date again. Flexible search is completely broken for a couple of months now for partner awards.
Delta does not care.
@David - I could be wrong but I don't recall ever seeing SkyTeam members on that page that you linked, but just Skymiles partners who are not part of SkyTeam
@David - uh oh...
I don't know if this is a glitch or not, but not only is the reservations system showing no partner awards but Delta's website only lists Thai AirAsia, Jetstar, and Skymark for partner award travel....... https://www.delta.com/content/www/en_US/skymiles/use-miles/award-travel/partner-airline-awards.html
@Lucky: what business class can be seen in the picture above?
It's nice having lucky actually care about how bad Deltas IT can be. Maybe now they will get enough bad press to pretend to fix it.
Same here. Can find BOS to LHR. But same search out of LAX gives error message.
I would find the flight (ex Europe) and price it. The flight would show up. I would click the 'pay in miles' button and would get the error message. I found the 'uh-oh' at the beginning of the error message slightly mocking.....
It's not just partner awards. Many one-stop itineraries on Delta metal cannot be booked either.
That explains it. I spent a good amount of hours this last weekend trying to figure out ways to empty out my balance of SkyPesos (out of Europe) and kept banging my head at this damn error message. I eventually gave up knowing how crappy this search tool is on a good day. Good to know that it's not just me and not normal.
I don't believe phone agents can access partner awards at the moment either. I tried booking with 3 different agents over the weekend and they couldn't find any partner availability on flights that showed saver awards on the KLM search engine.
I've also been having trouble finding Delta availability. Before Friday, I could find Tokyo to a hub, then a connecting flight to my home airport with ease every day. Now if I search delta.com for that, I get ZERO results. But I can find the flights with an Air France search.
It's not missing, it just that you don't have enough points for a redemption. Short hauls under 500 miles are now 300k SkyDongs and no more partner awards.
Delta representatives just got new software and they updated their website over the weekend. It has been very troublesome and 2 hour wait times throughout the days. To make a recent booking, I found partner availability on Air France for Monday night from NYC to China. I believe Delta has had problems with partner availability for some time now but this has been really bad. This does not look good for the future!
Probably Delta did the similar things as what United did with Singapore Airline's award ticket previously, but this time for all partners.... I just don't know with all of these manipulations whose will still stay loyal to Delta's mileage plan...
Thanks for posting this. I initially wasn't sure what was going on. As far as being able to book over the phone it's not as easy as it sounds. Seems like a lot of the agents I spoke with would receive the same error when trying to process the ticketing.
I was trying since Friday morning eastern time to book some award flights to Asia and kept having difficulty reaching an agent that was...
Thanks for posting this. I initially wasn't sure what was going on. As far as being able to book over the phone it's not as easy as it sounds. Seems like a lot of the agents I spoke with would receive the same error when trying to process the ticketing.
I was trying since Friday morning eastern time to book some award flights to Asia and kept having difficulty reaching an agent that was able to help me. On Fri morning the website was still displaying the availability. Finally after several different calls and verifying availability through Expert Flyer I was able Fri around 1pm to get in touch with an agent competent enough to ticket my itinerary.