A couple of weeks ago, Delta’s website suddenly stopped pricing stopovers on SkyMiles award tickets. While I wouldn’t have been surprised if Delta eliminated free stopovers on roundtrip tickets with the 2015 SkyMiles program, it was a bit disappointing to see them make this change without any advance notice, let alone acknowledgment.
A Delta spokesperson quickly clarified that there was no change to the stopover policy, but instead this was due to a change in IT at delta.com. He explained that award tickets with stopovers could now only be booked by phone. Reading between the lines, this seemed to suggest that Delta was preparing their IT for the 2015 SkyMiles program, and that this would mean the quiet death of stopovers on award tickets (which I think is sort of fair, since they’re adding one-way awards in the process).
My real issue wasn’t the change as such, but rather the practical implications of the way it was executed — Delta was knowingly charging customers the wrong prices online. Is it even legal for a company to knowingly charge customers the wrong price?
With that in mind, I do have to give Delta credit, because they’ve now updated the award search page on delta.com to reflect that awards with stopovers can be booked online. When you click on the “Multi-city” tab, you’ll see the following message:
To book an International Award Ticket that includes a stopover of more than 24 hours, contact a Reservation Specialist at 1-800-323-2323.
At least they fixed my biggest issue, which was them knowingly charging customers incorrectly.
I suppose in the end this was a useful warning. If you want to book a roundtrip SkyMiles award ticket with a stopover, make sure you do so by December 31, 2014. 😉
(Tip of the hat to Mac)
@lucky - probably wondering who "mac" is since there is no URL to a blog, twitter, facebook, etc linked. Who *is* mac? He sure gets a lot of hat tips...
@ gobluetwo -- Mac is one of the awesome people I work with at PointsPros. He's a Delta pro and all around good guy!
tip of the hat to mac...? *puzzled*
@ alex -- What are you puzzled by?
It's good that they're telling people that you have to call to book these, but considering how clueless DL agents tend to be, I don't know if this is much better than not allowing it.
I have to say this is full of ****. I called the Delta Elite Line and each rep came up with different amounts of miles for the same itinerary.
Yes, I saw this note. But called 3 times, they all provided 3 one-ways add-up total mileage when I added a stop-over on an open-jaw international trip. ... frustrated
You think it's fair they are dumping stopovers because they are going to allow one-ways? What is that Stockholm syndrome?
@ JB -- I think it's "fair" that they do whatever they want to their program, as long as they provide notice. And as consumers we can decide if the program still works for us.
Kudos to Delta on this, but WAY too late.
Has Delta clearly indicated that they will no longer allow stopovers on domestic round trip awards beginning 1/1/2015? I'm pretty sure these will be discontinued, but would love to be wrong since this is one of my person favorites. I'm in a pretty unique situation, commuting between two home cities for work, so this is very useful to me at the end of my work weeks at home #2 (in a DL hub).
@ Gene -- I reached out to them about this and they didn't say for sure one way or another. Based on the way it was said, think it's safe to infer, though...