How to find award space on Delta Air Lines

Introduction

Once you’ve decided where you want to go, you need to look for tickets (duh). The primary rule during this stage of the game is flexibility. You either need to have flexible airline miles or you need to have flexible dates. Having both would be ideal. This post will show you how to look for space on Delta and its partners to get where you want to go.

 

I’ll leave it to other blogs to point out the sweet spots. I think UpgradedPoints.com has some of the best posts out there on the best ways to get the most value out of your points, so I’ll send you to them. Here are a few that I’ve found particularly helpful:

·        12 Best Ways to Redeem Delta SkyMiles

·        17 Best Ways to Redeem Flying Blue Miles

·        12 Best Ways to Redeem Virgin Atlantic Flying Club Points

Delta Redemption Overview

Finding Space on Delta can be challenging. Delta’s miles can be a good value in some cases; in other cases, you should consider using their partners. I’ll show you how to look for and confirm availability on Delta and its partners. Delta’s partners (Virgin Atlantic and Air France) are both extremely useful for flying ON Delta. Delta’s SkyMiles are extremely useful for flying on its partners and for low-level economy domestic flights.

 

So, now you’ve earned lots of points and you’re getting ready to go on a honeymoon or yoga retreat or to visit your family in Japan and you need to find space. I have 3 rules of thumb that I generally follow to help me narrow down where to search first:

1. If I’m flying domestically, Delta & Virgin Atlantic are my best bets.

2. If I’m flying internationally and want economy, Flying Blue is the best place to go

3. If I’m flying internationally and want business, Virgin Atlantic is the best place to go

 

Normally, the easiest way to search is to pay for the $9.99 subscription to Expert Flyer. If you don’t want to pay for the subscription, you can always pay me to search for you, but you’re here because you want to know how to do it yourself.

 

However, at the time of writing, Expert Flyer was not showing Delta award availability. The next best thing to do is to things the old-fashioned way. You won’t even need to log-in to search Virgin Atlantic’s inventory. However, you will need to log in in order to search inventory on Flying Blue. I searched through months of Atlanta to Austin, switched to Virgin Atlantic, and on the second search found some space available for Atlanta to Los Angeles. 

Keeping Track of All Your Accounts

In order to be flexible, you’ll need to have accounts with most of the programs you’re likely to use. You probably already have a Delta account and are likely to consider transferring to them first, but you will also need a Flying Club account and a Flying Blue account in order to transfer your points to them. Also, Gary Leff at View From the Wing suggests creating an Air France Flying Blue account sooner rather than later, because they’re known for shutting down accounts that open and then immediately have points transferred to them. He suggests allowing your account to be open for 90 days and ideally crediting a flight.

 

I use award wallet (awardwallet.com) to keep track of all my credit card points, airline miles, and hotel points. It will alert me when my miles are within months of expiring or if I have a hotel free night expiring, or even an airline credit. I think it’s about $5 for 6 months, so it’s absolutely worth it in order to keep track of all your points and miles. An additional benefit that I use all the time is the password manager. It stores my passwords and allows me to login directly from award wallet, so I don’t have to remember all of many very unique passwords.

 

Once you’ve got your Virgin Atlantic and Flying Blue accounts set up and put into award wallet, click on the Virgin Atlantic account and it will take you straight there.

Once you click on the Virgin Atlantic account, it automatically logs you in (the first time you do this, you’ll need to download the extension, which is straightforward and takes just a couple of minutes). 

Domestic Travel

If you’re looking for domestic travel, Delta always has the capability of being lower. The lowest SkyMiles will go is 5,000 SkyMiles, but Virgin Atlantic is limited to 12,500. So, on cheap short-haul flights, you’ll have the best luck looking at Delta. However, on longer or more expensive fights, the general rule of thumb is to look at Virgin Atlantic.

 

 

In the upper left of the Virgin Atlantic search, you can switch between one week and four-week calendar view. You can see there are two rates available 12,500 and 25,000. What’s interesting is that on this particular route, Delta is cheaper by 1,000 miles. However, on the days that Virgin Atlantic is 25,000, Delta is selling for a minimum 29,500. As you can see, Virgin Atlantic is a strong and competitive option for domestic travel. At the same time, Air France is selling their lowest flight at 14,500, which is generally uncompetitive

 

In form and function, Virgin Atlantic search works just about the same as the Delta search. You don’t even have to log in to search. You can either search on delta.com or virginatlantic.com. You know if you see 12,500 on virginatlantic.com there could be cheaper prices on delta.com, so it’s always worth checking both. Thanks to its award chart, Virgin Atlantic is prix fixe at either 12,500 or 25,000; you know that the space is available on Delta and just need to check that Delta isn’t offering something lower than 12,500.

 

International Economy

If you’re looking for international economy, look no further than Flying Blue. Last summer we were looking to go to Japan to visit my wife’s family who was stationed in Osaka. I had searched high and low for, ideally, business class across the pond, but we didn’t have enough points to take care of that and a future trip to Bora Bora, as well.

 

Seeing the need to economize, we decided to fly economy non-stop to and from Japan. Delta had its brand-new A350 flying non-stop to Tokyo from Seattle. It was charging 47,000 SkyMiles for the privilege, per person, each way. However, checking Air France, I found the same flight for 27,000 points per person, each way. Even better, American Express had a 30% transfer bonus, so our actual price was 21,000 points per person each way. More than half off!

 

Unlike Virgin Atlantic and Delta, you will need an account just to search Flying Blue. Flying Blue has a lot of potential upside, with flights to Asia half or more off compared to what SkyMiles would charge. Unfortunately, things are in a lot of flux right now. I wasn’t able to find anything to validate rule #2 for Asia. That said, Air France’s prices are competitive (and would be better with any kind of transfer bonus from Amex or Citi). One other thing to remember is American Express charges a small tax for any transfer made to American carriers (Delta, JetBlue), so if the prices are equal, go for Flying Blue and prevent having to pay even a small amount of money more.

Once you've logged into your Flying Blue account, switch from "Purchase a Trip" to "Use Your Miles"

From here, enter your search criteria like you'd normally search for a flight. Be sure to enter the correct number of seats you're looking for and the cabin class you want. Then click search. If you get a hit, it will take you to the Flight Availability screen, seen below. One hiccup that Flying Blue has is that you can’t see a full week, just the day you selected, so you may want to check Delta first for cheap SkyMiles prices then go to Air France to hone in on the specific day. What Flying Blue does show that Delta doesn’t is the business class fare next to the economy fare. 

International Business

As you can see in the screenshot above, Flying Blue charges 72,000 points for flights to Europe. That’s not bad! It’s not great either. Now that we have positively identified that availability, let’s check out our options.

 

This is where the partners should really shine. According to Delta, they’ll sell you that seat through Minneapolis for 80,000 SkyMiles.

Here’s the kicker: that same flight is available through Virgin Atlantic for 58,000 Flying Club Points. Virgin Atlantic also has frequent transfer bonuses from American Express, I think about twice a year at either 25% or 30%, so there’s potential here for a lot of savings.

However, when I clicked through the link, what I found was surprising and honestly, preferable. Virgin is showing Delta’s flight non-stop from Seattle to Amsterdam available for 58,000. I would much rather take a 12 hour flight to Amsterdam and then back track an hour in economy compared to flying in economy 3.5 hours with 8 or 9 hours in business class. For me, this would absolutely be the winner. 

 

 

Also interesting is that Virgin is also offering their own flight non-stop for 67,500. Neither SkyMiles nor Flying Blue showed that availability. They’re offering seats on their own metal for so cheap (70,000 is an imaginary threshold in my head for "cheap")! I would probably still take the flight via Amsterdam though since the connection isn’t bad and nets me a little bit longer flight and saves almost 10,000 points. That decision is up to you.

Conclusion

The nicest thing about Delta’s partners is that it’s super easy to earn their points. You can collect via Amex, Chase, Citi, Marriott, or CapitalOne. You should never be earning just 1 point per dollar spent – you can have the Chase Freedom paired with a Sapphire card or the Double Cash paired with the Premier or Prestige card; either way, you should be earning 1.5x or 2x on everything you spend.

For finding flights on Delta, I find there are in general 3 rules of thumb; 2 of these I was able to prove out in this post and the other one may have been eliminated since last year. One, SkyMiles are best for incredibly cheap, short flights. Flying Club is likely better for longer / more expensive domestic flights. Two, Flying Blue and Delta are about on par for international economy. I’d say Flying Blue gets the slight nod despite its prices being slightly higher just because there’s no additional tax, it collects from five different banks / sources, and there are often transfer bonuses that have the potential to get much better value. Three, Flying Club absolutely rocks for Delta flights in Business Class. These rules obviously won't hold true all the time, but this is the way I think about them when I'm shopping for flights. It helps me keep things organized and know where to start looking.

 

Which program do you prefer to use to book your Delta flights? Let me know in the comments!