Delta SkyMiles is the loyalty program people love to hate. It’s been an industry leader in making customer-unfriendly moves, such as changing award prices with no warning (and claiming that letting members know in advance is illegal), eliminating award charts, rewarding miles based on the ticket price and not the miles in the air, and dynamic award pricing, which makes SkyMiles more like a fixed-value program. If you look at the award values, Delta would really like it if you redeem your miles for 1 cent each.
If you can find a Delta premium cabin flight at the base award price, booking it with miles from Flying Blue or Virgin Atlantic is usually cheaper than SkyMiles. I did that when we flew from Frankfurt to Orlando (on Delta’s worst long-haul business class, no less!).
The last time I used Delta’s program for anything other than domestic flights was in early 2019 when I redeemed 55,000 SkyMiles for premium economy on Virgin Atlantic to London.
If there’s any silver lining to Delta’s approach to the SkyMiles program, I no longer hoard SkyMiles. With some programs, I’ll hang onto my points for an aspirational trip, like when I used points from American AAdvantage and United MileagePlus to book flights to Japan in business and first class.
I’m usually terrible with the earn and burn mindset, and I earn more points than I use, but not with Delta. If we’re looking to fly with them, I’ll always see if it makes sense to use points instead of paying cash.
For example, I’m looking at flights to New York this winter. Several months out, prices are reasonable.
We’ve flown on Basic Economy with Delta before, and it’s not for us. Main cabin seats it is. I noticed something interesting when I looked at the prices in SkyMiles.
Two tickets in the Main Cabin would cost $218, or 17,000 SkyMiles and $11.20. That’s before you consider that I’ll save another 15% when paying with points for having a Delta co-brand AMEX card, which brings the price down to 14,400 SkyMiles.
That comes out to about 1.43 cents per SkyMile.
For the return flights, the cash prices and the miles required were higher. When I did the math, the price per mile was slightly lower at a 1.26 cents valuation for those tickets.
I’m glad to redeem SkyMiles for this value. I no longer consider Delta SkyMiles a program to accumulate miles for future redemptions. I don’t actively try to earn them either but there are occasionally some great sign-up offers for the Delta co-brand cards from AMEX if you’re eligible. When you see a 70,000-point SkyMiles bonus, think of it as a $1,000 credit for Delta flights and not some way to fly to Europe in Business or first class for free.
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3 comments
As a formerly rabid Delta/Skymiles fan I can only say that I dearly wish you were wrong.
I was able to get some great deals to both Japan and Stockholm with Delta. Stockholm was LAX-ARN in D1 both ways for 148,000 and LAX-HND in economy for 57,000 roundtrip. They do have sales and the Amex Delta Reserve card helps also.
Agree completely but recently lucked into an incredible deal using Skymiles on DL metal. My wife and I are flying to Taiwan in February for a cruise. Looking at options I decided on DL SEA-TPE in premium economy for 66,000 miles each (my wife and I have separate accounts with 100,000-250,000 miles each). I was OK with this as the list fare was around $900. I also planned to upgrade to Delta One if the upgrade cost dropped below $1000 each. Well about a month ago DL ran a limited special on SEA-TPE which I read about on a blog. I usually don’t have luck finding the advertised fares (either all gone or don’t work for days/routing I need). Sure enough Delta One on the day we planned to travel was 340,000 Skymiles one way. However, 2 days before it was only 83,000 Skymiles! I quickly asked my wife if she was OK with 2 extra days in Taipei (she was) so cancelled our flight in Premium Economy and booked Delta One for the 14 hour flight with only an incremental 17,000 Skymiles each. Amazing value as this is a $3100 fare (or close to 4 cents a Skymile). Obviously we lucked into this and I don’t keep more than 100,000-200,000 miles in our Skymiles accounts but deals do occasionally come up. I do find most of the value on domestic coach tickets though and use Flying Blue to get better value, as a rule, with Delta (for as long as that lasts )