Last week Tiffany wrote about how Delta was hiding partner award space on their website. Basically Delta’s website was refusing to show any partner award space when searching for one-way tickets. You’d either get options on Delta’s own flights, or otherwise would get an error message indicating that no results were found.
However, when searching for a roundtrip award ticket instead, the standard options would appear.
Tiffany was probably more forgiving than I would have been, assuming it was just a glitch. And I guess that could be the case, in theory. But as she also noted, I’m not exactly sure how a glitch like that would happen. It’s certainly a convenient glitch, whereby you’re showing your members less space than is actually available.
Well, the good news is that the glitch seems to have been fixed — delta.com is once again showing correct partner award space for one-way travel.
Using the same example as above, if you search for one-way award space for travel next summer between Houston and Paris, you’ll actually be brought to a page with results, rather than an error message.
Bottom line
Kudos to Delta for fixing this glitch. I still question how this happened to begin with, but ultimately what matters is that it works again. Sometimes it’s worth taking a step back and remembering that it was just last November that Delta introduced a functional award calendar, which made it possible to more easily search for awards online.
That ultimately doesn’t change the fact that Delta is still trying to make their program as revenue based as possible, but at least long term it’ll be easy to find those super expensive premium cabin awards. 😉
I hope someone is still following this article because I think the glitch is still there, but in a slightly different way. I can do a search, and in the 5 week calendar search, it will show plenty of "saver" level tickets (e.g. 50,000 miles OW HNL-TPE) but then when you click on the day that the calendar shows that amount, nothing near that prices pops up on the results screen. It is terribly annoying. Anyone else having the similar issues?
They just updated their terms and conditions to fix that, breaking out the different regions of the world which are supposed to have different high demand dates in Korean s program. Now you can use your miles for travel on Korean Air much more freely!
Any refunds of the telephone booking fees charged during the "glitch"?
Any apologies, sincere or otherwise?
Heck, did they even let anyone know?
Oh wait. Because. DL.
/nevermind
forgot to mention that I transferred some of my AMEX membership rewards points to my brother's Delta account to get enough miles for the award ticket.
@ JW -- Ah, that might be the issue then. You're not allowed to transfer points from AmEx to anyone else's airline account. But I haven't heard of them causing any issues in such an instance with Delta.
@lucky, I thought it's ok as long as the other person is an authorized user on your AMEX credit card. I did it in the past with other airlines (Aeroplan) and didn't have a problem, maybe Delta is tricky.
@ JW -- Ah, if he's an authorized user then it should indeed not be an issue. Not sure what the problem is then.
@lucky, I had my brother booked an award ticket for me from his account last night, fee was paid using my credit card. This morning the ticket was cancelled and miles redeposited. Call Delta this morning and was told it's due to fraud, still working on reinstating it. I'm curious what triggered it, should the fee be paid using the account owner's credit card?
@ JW -- That's VERY strange. Using a different credit card shouldn't be an issue, usually. Not sure what would explain that.
@lucky, both of us have recently opened Delta accounts due to the Delta AMEX signup (via your link), the miles were just deposited in the last week or so after we met the spending requirement. Could that be the reason? btw the ticket is on VS and AF.
It may be fixed on Delta's site, but as of 10 minutes ago I was unable to book two delta segments through Alaska Airlines website despite the fact that those segments showed as available. I called Alaska and they confirmed it is an known issue and "they're working on it".
If I had a nickel....
The calendar is still pretty glitchy (much better than it was last year and before), but I'll take it.
As a programmer: bugs happen. IT issues happen. This might speak to some sort of internal issue that needs to be addressed or additional testing that needs to happen before deploy, but seriously, glitches happen, and I doubt it's all that sinister.
(Unless of course they're planning to eliminate partner one-ways in the future, in which case, whoops. ;))
What are your top 3 headline options for the post announcing AA's shift to a revenue-based model for AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAdvantage?
Don't tell us you haven't thought about it.