Questions and Answers

Hello! I am trying to book a business-class flight from New York to Taipei using DL miles. China Airlines (a Delta partner) runs a direct JFK-TPE flight, but there is no availability during the dates when I am looking. CI also runs two daily LAX-TPE flights and one daily SFO-TPE flight, and there is plenty of availability. All of these options cost 80,000 skymiles. I’d be happy to take one of the connecting flights if I could just add on a segment on Delta from JFK to either LAX or SFO.

But there’s the problem. Every single day on the schedule, the cheapest Delta One flight from JFK to either LAX or SFO is 67,500 miles. When I try to book JFK-LAX-TPE, or JFK-SFO-TPE, it prices additively, at a total of 147,500 miles, rather than for a total of 80,000 miles.

Does anyone have any experience adding a positioning domestic Delta One segment to an international award? I’m wondering if a phone agent would be able to make this work without pricing additively. Or perhaps it is simply impossible to add a Delta One flight to an international award since, at least at the moment, the domestic Delta One flights are literally never available at the lowest tier.

Thank you very much.

It will definitely price additively, unless you find Delta space at the saver level. This post might help:

[URL]http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2015/06/12/what-no-one-else-will-tell-you-about-booking-delta-awards/[/URL]

Thank you, Tiffany. I’d read through your report, which is really fantastic. The trouble is that with no award chart, on a route without partner flights it’s pretty hard to figure out how much a saver-level award would be!! I guess the issue here is that Delta simply does not release saver-level (or Tier 1) space in Delta One between JFK and LAX/SFO, or at least that it hasn’t done so currently for any date on the schedule.

Right, they never used to release saver space on that route as a matter of policy, though I think that’s gotten better.

The best way to search for saver/Tier1 Delta space is to use the Alaska website — Alaska only has access to Tier1 flights.