It's All About the Miles

We presently have more than a dozen future flights booked with Delta and we frequently check our bookings for schedule changes. One of our trips is coming home from Quebec by way of New York (JFK) and Salt Lake City (SLC). We made this booking when we bought the train tickets across Canada from Vancouver, B.C. back in November. We paid for the flight with accrued miles plus a few hundred dollars in taxes and fees.

 

Wouldn't you know, the little regional airline company (Delta Code-Share) that takes us to JFK changed their schedule to a 5:15 a.m. departure from Quebec. Delta took it on themselves to change our itinerary to earlier flights from JFK and SLC which we would normally applaud, BUT, the seats we had on the original flights were premium "Comfort+" and we got really bad seat assignments on the revised schedule. Now JFK to Salt Lake is over 5 hours and in seats that don't recline would be torturous. O.K., so our Platinum Elite Plus status with Delta has made us a little spoiled.

 

Hey, we're still learning… Four phone calls to Delta's Premium Sales line and exploring half a dozen alternatives taught us a few things:

 

1.     Purchasing a flight with miles is a non-revenue flight and puts us at the bottom of the pecking order in terms of complimentary upgrades.

2.     We can't use the upgrade certificates in our account on non-rev flights.

3.     We can't revert to our original bookings from JFK to Reno (which would mean a 7 hour layover at JFK) because everything on the later flights are sold out.

 

Somewhere in the discussions and looking for alternative routings using the "Flexible Dates" feature on Delta.com revealed a First Class fare on the day before our original departure of under $600 USD; what a steal! All three legs of the trip in the forward cabin? Hey, I can go for it. First Class fares from the East Coast are usually over $1,500 and then some.

 

So a fifth call to Premium Sales and we learned a couple more things:

 

1.     Talking to a real person can get you what you want if you ask the right questions

2.     The 25,000 miles we paid for the original itinerary goes immediately back into our account

3.     The taxes and fees are refunded, so the cost of the new First Class ticket is under $500 net.

 

We still love Delta…

 

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