Delta Discounting Business Class Awards to Europe Through April 21 With Great Availability

Earlier I wrote that Delta appeared to be having an unannounced award sale. Now they’ve announced it (HT: skdelta in the comments).

Of course the very idea of a ‘sale’ suggests that there are ‘regular prices’. We know that there are, Delta has inventory buckets and those buckets correspond to price charts. Despite Delta’s protestations to the contrary that prices are simply quoted at will, we know that all Delta has done is removed their award charts from public view in order to ensure members have less information. An uneducated consumer is SkyMiles’ best friend.

  • Roundtrip travel required
  • Book by April 21
  • Travel between June 3 and October 29, 2016
  • 50 day advance purchase necessary
  • 7 day minimum stay required
  • Route-specific blackout dates apply

Availability to several eligible cities is really quite good as I indicated earlier.

Here are the published eligible cities however in earlier searching I did see a couple of date for Los Angeles – London at 115,000 (connecting in Seattle) so even if the list is intended to be exhaustive, it may not be:

FROM

TO

DELTA ONE™

AWARD TICKETS
(ROUNDTRIP)*

Atlanta, GA (ATL)

Frankfurt, Germany (FRA)

105,000 miles

+ taxes and fees

Atlanta, GA (ATL)

Rome, Italy (FCO)

105,000 miles

+ taxes and fees

Boston, MA (BOS)

London-Heathrow, United Kingdom (LHR)

105,000 miles

+ taxes and fees

Boston, MA (BOS)

Paris-Charles de Gaulle, France (CDG)

105,000 miles

+ taxes and fees

Detroit, MI (DTW)

Paris-Charles de Gaulle, France (CDG)

105,000 miles

+ taxes and fees

New York-Kennedy, NY (JFK)

Frankfurt, Germany (FRA)

105,000 miles

+ taxes and fees

New York-Kennedy, NY (JFK)

Manchester, United Kingdom (MAN)

105,000 miles

+ taxes and fees

New York-Kennedy, NY (JFK)

Shannon, Ireland (SNN)

105,000 miles

+ taxes and fees

New York-Kennedy, NY (JFK)

Zurich, Switzerland (ZRH)

105,000 miles

+ taxes and fees

Philadelphia, PA (PHL)

London-Heathrow, United Kingdom (LHR)

105,000 miles

+ taxes and fees

Salt Lake City, UT (SLC)

London-Heathrow, United Kingdom (LHR)

115,000 miles

+ taxes and fees

Salt Lake City, UT (SLC)

Paris-Charles de Gaulle, France (CDG)

115,000 miles

+ taxes and fees

Seattle, WA (SEA)

Amsterdam, Netherlands (AMS)

115,000 miles

+ taxes and fees

Book soon for your summer SkyMiles award travel to Europe!

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Maybe the greatest thing about your blog is your willingness to share your honest criticisms (or praise) based on your expertise. Keep it up. Your strong opinions help me focus on the most valuable programs. I have a few thousand Delta miles, probably enough for a Cosmo subscription.

  2. Don’t have any interest in Delta flights at all. They make it too hard to plan and find award trips and the points needed for a trip. I refuse to fly Delta for this reason. I won’t even fly them when they have sales on their prices for any tkts. It helps that I don’t live in a Delta hub. I looked up 2 different prices in the last 6 mos and both could be found on United & American at cheaper amounts. One was about $100 and the other was about $140. Might just be my trip locations, but I don’t need Delta and to me they just do not exist as a flt option.

  3. Gary,
    Since Delta is now “revenue based” it seems like the pendulum is swinging the other way. We now have discounted “revenue based” awards due to lack of usage of mileage tickets. The only problem is there may be not much out there in the way of frequent traveler miles to buy these mileage tickets.
    Given the opacity of how Delta deals with its mileage flyers how do they intend to establish a stable revenue flow selling miles when they need to sell miles in times of bad business or a more competitive environment due to lower oil prices? Do people actually apply and get Delta Skymiles credit card these days and try to earn miles on spend given this type of mileage program environment that Delta is now practising?
    Since they will not get a significant cash flow selling miles my guess is you will see this in their revenue ticket pricing which they have to discount which is a more direct hit on their financials and sales.
    If you go “revenue based” on your mileage plan I believe you are actually putting your financial “eggs” in one basket. So in times or bad business both your ticket sales and mileage sales will bleed.
    This is probably different than in the past when mileage programs would be a natural “hedge” in terms of providing a more stable cash flow in bad times vis a vis the airline’s ticket sales.

    I hope American Airlines sees this clearly with Delta and not go this path.

  4. Actually, the 105k miles is available for less than 7 day stays, and is very often available. A SALE is more like the 87,500 they had last month for the Spring. I got excited when I read there was a Summer sale, so I started looking around and had no problem at all finding 105k prices to almost everywhere, and a few 95k as well. Alas, nothing good to places I want to go (I’m really looking for under 100k for a “sale”).

  5. Less than 18 months ago I redeemed for two business class awards ATL-STU-CDG-ATL on DL & AF for 125K each. How is 210K each now a good deal? An old athletic coach once told me, after what I thought was a stellar performance, “you’re only good by comparison.” The current comparison for me is two business class tickets booked 2/16 for Fall travel ATL-DOH-SIN, then HKG-JFK, LGA-ATL. With my two year focus on AA I easily had the 295K required amount (inc. 10K kicked back from the Citi card/cards) for QR, CX and AA, and that’s being ATL based! I’ve been doing this for awhile with most FF enrollments beginning in 1981. Does anybody recall that Delta originally had a business class award, requiring round trip U.S.-Europe travel for two at 150K. Apples and oranges to a degree but there’s another comparison.

  6. Say whatever bad you want about Delta but this is a decent sale, especially for summer travel to Europe. But then I’m hub bound, a DL sale like this makes it MUCH more appealing to me…non-stop on DL or at least one stop on anyone else. Might just have to swing a trip this summer…

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