Delta has once again increased prices, in terms of miles, for redeeming their own Skymiles for partner award flights. This time they increased business class prices by as much as 60%! This is terrible news for travelers who need to or have to fly Delta most of the time.
I am not loyal to any airline. I decided years ago that price, schedule, and routing are more important to me. Years ago I was a Delta elite flyer living in Atlanta. During my years as a Medallion flyer I saw Skymiles deteriorate. Once my work travel stopped (job change!) I was no longer loyal to anything aside from my own wallet.
Now that I live in Florida I have fairly equal choices on who to fly to most places. Direct flights aren’t common out of my home airport of JAX so I instead look for the best deal: in cash or in miles and of course schedule. I do not fly a single airline enough to justify changing my patterns to maintain an elites status. This is also the case for most leisure travelers in the USA.
To illustrate how bad the Delta Skymiles devaluation is I will compare them to American Airlines’ AAdvantage redemption on the same route. With new prices it costs 165,000 Delta Skymiles for a one way partner award ticket from the USA to Bangkok, Thailand at its lowest price. American AAdvantage charges 140,000 miles round trip for the same route in business class at the saver level! American only charge 70,000 miles one way for business class at the saver level for USA to Bangkok, Thailand.
To make matters worse Delta didn’t even give any warning of the price increase. They just simply did it yesterday (Feb 5, 2021) with no notice of any sort. I will add that most of their negative changes come with no notice and I feel compelled to publish these changes. They clearly don’t care what their customers think.
It is a shame Delta have chosen to act in this manner time and again. Aside from the Skymiles program they are actually a pretty good airline. I will still fly them in the future but now need to look into crediting miles to partner programs for better value. I simply do not understand why Delta would choose to drive away loyal flyers during arguably the worst time to be an airline.
