I got to this thread late =) But I was wondering why there’s not a more manual option for searching for flights, if the easy way isn’t providing the most accurate information. I’m a Delta junkie I guess you can say, and I could easily route myself anywhere in the network- just give the the schedule book and I can figure it out (I should be a travel agent… but alas, the internet makes that impossible).

It would be nice to be able to research each leg, on each flight, to see which ones have the cheapest seats or best timing… since award availability is always going to take the higher tier, you could split travel dates by a day or two to save some 30k to 40k miles!

You did mention the amount of processing power required to provide instantaneous accurate results. A suggestion: allow for results to be emailed at a later date. Say if you are searching a little bit farther ahead, say 6 months or more, you can present the system a query for a trip with date ranges and mileage you’d be willing to part with for that, if you need more specific routing, you could add that… the computer will the process that request more more touroughly and email the user back a more comprehensive list of possible trips. You select one, it checks back to make sure its still available (maybe medallion members can have their most relevant search result held for 24hrs?) and you can book it. But then the computer would be searching every combination and reporting them back to the user in an email- so if one’s no longer useable, just click the second link.

Just an idea. I’m sure there’s times your servers aren’t working overtime, so you can just use that time.

Please HELP!!!!!

Here is the problem with that. On a flgiht with zero first class seats booked, it still showed a higher level of skysaver miles!! Can you please explain this? Why is it demanding a higher tier of skymiles instead of the lowest skysaver?

Also with your introduction of 3 tier pricing just showing sky saver and skychoice has no meaning. Why not show the availability in 3 tiers, however you call it - For e.g. skysaver1, skysaver2, skychoice. Or even better drop the skysaver and ksychoice and call it Tier I, II and III.

This would save us a lot of time and grief, to be honest as it is really frustrating to pull up dates (and lots of them) only to see either no skysavers when it says there is or a much higher tier.

The award calendar does not let you go past 331 days. It makes it difficult/impossible to book long term travel due to that (if you are really trying to get ahead in line early). Would it be possible, say, to allow for the return flight to be booked per fare rules (I think most international flights are 4 months max?) or at least 45 days from start date of journey (which can be max of 331 days from today).

I can only see excellent customer benefits for this without any downside/loss for Delta and hope you would consider this.

I still did some random checking of award calendar availability today and it seems to have the same issues mentioned as above. So hopefully if the team is still looking in all this, perhaps they can consider the suggestion above.

Thanks

Now some suggestions/comments/problems
1) I agree with all of them that the search has a flow… shows skysaver awards with none being available that day when there are none. If what you say is true, it should not show up in repeat searches. It does - telling me something is wrong with algorithm
2) When you try to switch between award classes - it does get stuck (at times) in trying to retreive information and never finishes it
3) Multi city award travel - Shouldnt an option be to do multi city with class specification for each leg?
4) Multi airports in same city (such as Chicago, Houston - shouldnt there be an airport code that shows all options for airports in same city e.g. Hou = All airports in houston - some airlines do this) - this is different that searching nearby airports….

Finally here is a lengthy explaination for one bug I had to kind of bypass the system. I was flying from Houston (IAH or Hou) to Mumbai. This requires a connection from Houston to Atl to Mumbai. In addition to problems above, it did not show me all flight options for available award type. To further explain when I searched only for Hou-Atl - it did show me skysaver availability and ATL to BOM too.. but when i tried to do the entire booking as one shot - it was not an option. Sadly - it was not the optimal route and required longer layovers. I booked and had to call the skymiles number. Guess what - i was rite - it was available and they asked me to pony up $100 to reissue ticket with no change in miles as skysaver was available on a better connection. On one leg the work around was booking it as multi city travel. In fact i had to do multicity as Delta codes IAH and HOU as two different airpots and I really think that having one code that combines the two can really help travellers as it throws so many more options. More options for travellers can only mean more business for delta I would think as it probably gives them options for timing more in line with what they may be looking for.

I have rambled a bit here so please let me know if i can further explain any of this. Frankly, the fact that you have this and the actual team is interacting with customers is huge!!! Keep it up!!

I’m with yngdiego - I’d rather wait and get accurate results than get bad results fast. So if you code needs to be more complex, so be it.

BTW - why don’t you guys put some ideas in beta, get users to test them (maybe you do) I for one would be glad to test.