Guys, drop everything you’re doing. Delta SkyMiles is having a Delta One (business class) award sale, and you can fly roundtrip from Miami to Brussels for just 570,000 miles!!
In this post:
Delta One three-day award sale, starting at 98K miles
If you’ve ever redeemed Delta SkyMiles, you probably know how inflated premium cabin award rates are. Occasionally Delta SkyMiles has an award sale, which lowest business class redemption rates from offensively outrageous to just uncompetitively high. 😉
Delta SkyMiles has just launched a three-day Delta One award sale, valid for bookings from December 17 through December 19, 2024. The deals differ significantly based on where you’re originating, but you can go to this page, enter the origin, and then see what is available.
Delta highlights some of the below as the best business class deals with this sale, like being able to fly to Europe or Asia for just under 200,000 SkyMiles roundtrip, and being able to fly to Latin America for 200,000 SkyMiles roundtrip. In many cases you need to travel roundtrip to get the best price, so a one-way isn’t always going to cost half as much as a roundtrip.
When I enter the origin of Miami (where I live), Delta highlights deals like Miami to Paris roundtrip for 270,000 miles, or Miami to Brussels for 510,000 miles. For quite some time, Delta’s single best long haul award pricing seems to be on the carrier’s Seattle to Taipei route, where rates start at under 100,000 miles one-way.
Keep in mind that all of these redemption rates are before the 15% discount that Delta Amex cardmembers can receive. I absolutely wouldn’t transfer any Amex Membership Rewards points to Delta to take advantage of this deal, but if you have any SkyMiles already, this could be a good way to use it.
If you are going to fly Delta One business class, be strategic about which planes you book, as the quality differs greatly between aircraft.
The best uses of Delta SkyMiles otherwise
Here’s the thing — Delta SkyMiles aren’t useless, they’re just valuable in different ways than other currencies. On the plus side, the miles have a pretty high floor value, which is to say that you can efficiently redeem them toward economy seats on most flights where the cash fares are reasonable.
However, Delta seems to intentionally have high business class award pricing on long haul flights, because the airline wants to condition people to think of SkyMiles as a revenue based program, and wants people to think of business class as something you pay top dollar for.
If you want to get the best deal possible redeeming SkyMiles for first and business class, the key is for travel to not originate or terminate in the United States. Award pricing is much more attractive when traveling between other regions.
Bottom line
Delta SkyMiles currently has an award sale, offering discounted Delta One redemptions. There are some okay deals to be had, especially compared to what Delta would usually charge. However, you’ll find business class award rates much lower than this at American and United, without any sort of an award sale.
What’s your take on this Delta One award sale?
Then you have to factor in a 15% discount so that award sounds halfway decent, essentially means it’s not a decent award. They advertising a round-trip award ticket to Tokyo for 400,000 miles. That’s just despicable, but I do not want to interrupt the parade of the Delta fanboys
I think the more interesting conversation is how / why DL continues to command incredible loyalty and financial performance despite the obvious gaps in value relative to competitors. I don’t get it but I sure do respect it.
This is a respectable sale for TPAC. 85k with the Amex discount is roughly inline with most other programs.
This has a good deal for people needing specific dates since it's wide-open. This will help their TPE LFs immensely (even if it's not super lucrative to do this, it will cut into the competition). The HND sale is obviously done to help with the Japan off-season since it ends right before the peak in March.
Bingo. The availability is what helps elevate this deal.
the weird takes in this thread are more interesting than the thread topic itself is
We can agree this is an av topic. But, we all know Delta is this way. We really don't need to be reminded. So, let's not give Delta another minute of our mental energy. Let's simply move on and talk about happier and more productive topics in the hobby.
All Delta is saying to the world is that their currency and their word is trash.
I believe the !
This sale seems decent to me, especially with the 15% discount factored in. Obviously not the best deal on the planet, but the relatively good availability takes away a lot of stress.
I may end up redeeming for a one-way with Delta and then use Finnair points for the return flight with JAL. Mix and match.
Ive used delta miles for Europe to Australia. I think 90k miles. Pretty decent at that price. Lots of Vietnam airlines availability.
One of the better deals I have seen is JFK to MAD for 166K round trip in March (all prices assume 15% discount for holding a Delta Amex).
This is great! Just rebooked ICN-SEA-PDX in April and went from originally being booked on a a339 in prem econ for 125k, to D1 on newly upgauged a359 for 110k.
This is clearly a return of the Delta One "flash sale" that Delta used to run for European travel in both the Spring and the Fall on a somewhat consistent basis. The last time they did this was in 2022, which got a lot of people trips to Europe. This looks similar, albeit at prices that are about 50K-60K above what they did in 2022. If I recall, I redeemed to Barcelona at about 148K...
This is clearly a return of the Delta One "flash sale" that Delta used to run for European travel in both the Spring and the Fall on a somewhat consistent basis. The last time they did this was in 2022, which got a lot of people trips to Europe. This looks similar, albeit at prices that are about 50K-60K above what they did in 2022. If I recall, I redeemed to Barcelona at about 148K round trip in September 2022; now they seem to want 210K for most destinations. Nevertheless, at roughly ~100K each way from NYC to a good amount of EU destinations, this is probably the best way people are going to get value out of Skymiles when redeeming Delta One to Europe, which is obviously a very popular vacation. I am glad to see these flash sales return...
It's wild to me that an airline would actually advertise 510K miles as any sort of deal. Even if they're 'conditioning' people to think J redemptions should be expensive, at 1cpp, I'd say $5,100 for MIA-BRU-MIA would be expensive. You should be able to beat that anytime on a litany of carriers with an experience much better than DL 767s.
If you can get them! These used to be plentiful at one time. Now may be one seat on one flight at release of schedule.
Having said that, I have been able to get them at 50k with lots of flexibility. And even more than one seat.
Air France still has good value though it is beginning to change.
Looked at the dates of travel that would work for me and the places I want to go because of existing travel and found that again there was nothing worth rescheduling. Again. As usual.
Thanks for the info! I just rebooked two tickets to Korea and got a refund of 120,000 miles!
“If you want to get the best deal possible redeeming SkyMiles for first and business class, the key is for travel to not originate or terminate in the United States. “
Don’t you mean originate, terminate or traverse through North America?
@ JD -- You can potentially get a good value if connecting in the US, like my recent SkyMiles redemption from Santiago to Mexico City via Atlanta:
https://onemileatatime.com/reviews/delta-one-business-class-a350/
Ben - You can fly from a number of Delta hubs (JFK, MSP, DTW in particular) to a number of European cities (MAD, ZHR, LIS, DUB, BRU) for 196K round trip. With a Delta credit card, that is reduced to 166K round trip, or 83K each way. Your redemption from Santiago to Mexico City via Atlanta was 65.8K - but required that you originate in Santiago, and includes a frankly out of the way connection...
Ben - You can fly from a number of Delta hubs (JFK, MSP, DTW in particular) to a number of European cities (MAD, ZHR, LIS, DUB, BRU) for 196K round trip. With a Delta credit card, that is reduced to 166K round trip, or 83K each way. Your redemption from Santiago to Mexico City via Atlanta was 65.8K - but required that you originate in Santiago, and includes a frankly out of the way connection in Atlanta. I would argue that 83K from the US to Europe non-stop is a better "value" for most people than a 65.8K connection from Chile to Mexico via the Southeastern US....
What does Luigi Mangione think about this?
Gary Leff calls it theft.
Delta SkyMiles have never been useless. People here just can't wrap their heads around that it's perfectly normal and expected for the most premium company (in any field) to charge a premium for their services and/or product. Simple economics.
If AA was half the airline DL is today, do you really think their points program would look so attractive?
Sure, but those don’t have to be mutually exclusive. You can be a premium airline and still offer something financially enticing to customers.
I think Air France is a good example of this. Nobody would consider their redemptions to be outstanding, but they at least offer some attractive deals now and then. It keeps the program fun and interesting.
I consider 50K Flying Blue redemptions on AF metal to be outstanding.
Oh Tim,
do you really have to pretend like this. Your writing style is all over this.
Are you this sad? I mean. Everyone knows you are. but pretend for your own sake
It's a testament to the stupidity of the general public that Delta can generate billions in revenue each year from such a god-awful reward currency.
What do you mean maybe? This is DELTA we're talking about
forgot to specify that the above is ONE WAY!
AA seems to be catching up fast: BNA-BCN with a 5.17 AM departure and 8h 56 min connection at MIA in mid January is 400k! Not award sale though, I hasten to add......
@ Daniel B. -- Oh, no doubt AA has a lot of awards with high pricing, but the idea is that there are consistently opportunities to redeem for long haul flights in premium cabins at a reasonable cost. That simply doesn't exist with SkyMiles, at least for travel to or from the United States.
@Lucky: of course, I fully agree with you, in fact I have 10 trips scheduled for 2025 all with 57.5k o/w business class tickets :-)). Even the BNA-BCN I got for 57.5k.