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…
Continue reading: Expert Flyer no longer displays Korean Air business class award availability except intra-Asia
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
So now if you call Delta, you may need to call 11 times only to find out there was no availability?
Sigh.
How many Ultimate Rewards points would I need to transfer to Korean Air for the privilege of being able to search for ICN-US business class award space?
the only true value i see for sky pesos is Virgin Australia, Skyteam award in business to Africa with Paris stopover, and Tahiti. Those are the only awards i would ever do with Delta, and of course, none of those awards are even on Delta metal, other than perhaps the gateway flight, which is usually easier to get on Alaska.
do you have any info on the new JetBlue/Korean Air partnership? Might be a new way to redeem Amex points for Korean reward travel... Their site was less than helpful when I went poking around...
I just finished my marathon SkyMiles booking of Korean and Vietnam on a trip to SGN. I used SkyMiles to book the KE legs, and of course there were no feeder flights at low except noon on wednesdays 😉 so I used Avios for that.
I had on hold AS from SJC-LAX, KE from LAX-NRT, VN from NRT-SGN, and on the return, KE to ICN and the KE A380 from ICN-JFK. This is a perfectly valid open jaw itinerary, pricing at low.
The lady at the re-issue desk (it was a change) first insisted it was an invalid routing (hint: Vietnam segments mean the award will fail to auto price and will fail to calculate taxes/fees) then told me it was a round-the-world routing (...?) and finally put me on hold for 45 minutes. She came back, told me her "support desk" found the routing invalid (couldn't tell me why) and that they'd re-built the itinerary using Delta via ATL on different dates and demanded +100,000 SkyMiles -- even though checkin opens in 4 days. When I voiced my frustration she hung up.
I had to spend another 2 hours re-building the itinerary with the next agent, and going back to the re-issue desk. Suddenly, it (manually) priced just fine 😐
I forgot, the best part was that the portion she destroyed was one I was ALREADY CONFIRMED ON with an issued ticket 😛 It was the return portion I was trying to change, and she didn't mind that one bit...