I hate to say it, but I think this is the biggest improvement to the Delta SkyMiles program in years. Even more frustrating to me than Delta’s devalued mileage currency is how incredibly incompetent their SkyMiles agents are. Up until now there was no way to search Korean Air award availability online, which meant the only way to find out about Korean Air award space was to call SkyMiles. I gave up on that last year after having at least a handful of agents that had never heard of Korean Air. So while Korean Air actually has decent award availability, I’ve found actually booking award tickets on them through Delta to be a royal pain at best and nearly impossible at worst.
Well, it appears as if ExpertFlyer (which is a subscription service that costs $99.99 per year or has monthly subscription options) has just started displaying business class award space on Korean Air.
To look up Korean Air award space, just log into your ExpertFlyer account and click on “Awards & Upgrades.”
From there type in the route you want, then select “Korean Air” in the drop down menu, and then select “Business – Award (O).”
Then the next page will display the award space. The number next to “O” displays how many business class award seats are available.
Award space is actually fairly good on Korean Air, especially now that you can find it without having to talk to a SkyMiles agent.
A few reminders:
- While you can redeem Delta miles for Korean Air business class, you can’t redeem them for Korean Air first class.
- Korean Air serves a ton of destinations in North America, including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, and Vancouver.
- Delta does impose blackout dates for Korean Air redemptions, which wouldn’t be reflected on ExpertFlyer. According to this FlyerTalk post, the blackout dates for 2012 are as follows: January 1-8, January 20-25, March 1-4, May 4-6, May 18-July 1, July 14-August 26, September 28-October 3, and December 7-31 (put simply, the whole summer is blocked out)
(Tip of the hat to Gary)
EF just confirmed that O inventory is no longer available for routes outside of Asia.
Not seeing O inventory information for KE on EF for any dates for a variety of routes searched for later this month (outside of published blackout dates). Am I missing something or did KE pull this information from being available to EF?
@Nathan, We don’t claim that the award inventory shown is available to partners, just that it is available to that airlines frequent flyers. It may or may not be available to partner programs as well. Our information, as usual, is accurate.
@ dmodemd -- They do have coach awards, though they just don't show up on Expert Flyer.
No coach awards? Or is there no such thing on Korean Air?
@ Kevin -- I'll have a post on this by Tuesday at the latest. It's in the works. :)
Ben,
Korean Air awards seem like a good use of Chase Sapphire points - would you agree? Can we transfer Chase points into their program for 1st class awards?
Well as usual EF is a tool that gives lots of misinformation. If you see 2 seats available on the KE long-haul flights to the states there are 0 flights available. If you see 3 then there is 1 seat available.
Being based in ATL and mainly redeeming for north Asia business class awards...I'm excited! Now i only hope the Skymiles agent will agree to try to book the spaces we are seeing on expert flyer..
Yeah!!
Sadly, I decided this week that the best use for our millions of Skymiles was 167 r/t upgrades from K class to G class SFO-ATL. Now, finally another decent way to use SkyMiles. Best FF news in weeks.
I'm sure Jeff Robertson will quickly find a way to put an end to this.
If you want a free interface to search the Korean inventory (and several others) including alerts there is also my Reward Search site: http://wandr.me/AirlineAwards.
I'm making a few updates to it this weekend to further improve the data display, but the functionality is solid. You don't even need to remember the specific buckets as I've programmed that in for you.
Oh, and it covers more than just Korean.
Enjoy!