You may have already noticed that we’ve made some changes with our SkyMiles award calendar on delta.com. The first change was to remove the calendar as part of the default path for searching. It’s still available by request when you start or revise a search, which aligns what you’ll see on delta.com and nwa.com. The second change was to provide additional information above the calendar itself explaining why what you see in the calendar might differ from what you see on the Select Flights page.
There are times where the calendar’s results don’t match what you see on the Select Flights page. Why? Several technical issues have recently developed due to the inclusion of partner airlines in the search results, our three-tier award structure, and the ability to mix and match award levels.
As a result, we have already implemented or are taking the following steps:
- We added some explanatory info to the calendar itself to make clear the technical limitations that apply to its function.
- We’ve removed the calendar from the default path when shopping for awards. We considered removing the calendar entirely while resolving these technical issues, but determined that it remains a useful tool for finding award availability even with these limitations, so we have opted to continue to make it available in the interim for customers who choose to use it.
- In the coming days, we’ll remove all airlines other than DL and NW from inclusion in the calendar results. Partner airlines’ flights will still be available on the date-specific Select Flights pages. Due to the volume of traffic it would generate, it isn’t possible to do real-time inventory look ups on all possible partner airlines’ flights and routings, of which there are literally hundreds of thousands of possible combinations of days/partners/classes of service/etc. As a result, calendar availability for other airlines is pulled from a cache. Providing you with the best possible experience is a delicate balance between giving you the most options possible to get to your destination, including Delta flights and those of our partners, and ensuring the accuracy of the data for a given date. We have decided that leaving partner airlines on the Select Flights page and removing them from the calendar display best strikes this balance, and aligns the Delta and Northwest online experiences.
- We are working on ways to bring even more options on the Select Flights page to ensure we’re showing as many options as possible to help you get to your destination, while keeping the process as easy as possible to navigate.
With these modifications, we believe the calendar will do a better job of assisting more customers in planning their travel. We are hard at work to continue to provide you the best experience possible at delta.com, leveraging the talent, experience, and best practices of a great team with hundreds of years of combined experience at both Delta and Northwest.
Providing timely, accurate, and convenient planning tools for you is at the top of our priority list, and we appreciate your feedback.
Josh Weiss
Managing Director
delta.com & self-service
March 2nd, 2009 at 9:48 pm
I’m sorry, but I do not agree with this. If you want myself and probably a lot of your other customers to feel confident that we are getting the most accurate information electronically and not find it necessary to call the airline I suggest that you change your plan. Here is a suggestion:
Instead of having one calendar that searches Delta and all its partners, why don’t you have multiple calendars for customers to look at. For example, have 1 calendar for JUST DL and NW, have 1 for Alaska, and have 1 for your international partners (AF, KL, etc.). People can select what calendar to look at.
I will tell you right now that searching for Delta award tickets is a complete pain because it is SO unreliable. What you are suggesting will probably make it worse, as a matter of fact, I probably will call Delta to see what’s available and then book it online.
March 2nd, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Hi Josh, thanks for the update. I wanted to make sure you were aware (though I’m sure you are) that besides the calendar the actual functionality of the award search is broken. For example, i performed a simple r/t search today (with no calendar) from ATL to CUN on set dates. The first time the program came back that no flights were found. Running the same search 2 minutes later found additional flights but none of the direct DELTA flights that nwa.com was showing. I called the Plat Medallion desk who was able to see the flights but of course i would be penalized with the agent fee. About two hours later the Delta site finally found the flights. This has happened to me countless times the last few months for both domestic and international locations. NWA.com always finds them right away and with the transfer option now, i’ll probably just move them to NWA and book through their site. I hope that you are looking at that site and the way they perform queries and provide results. It always works and is simple and easy to read. Their search works much better with your partner airlines (AF / KLM / Continental) as well. Thanks for allowing us to provide feedback. Adam
March 2nd, 2009 at 10:57 pm
So it appears you have created the periodic table of mile redemption. Sadly this year I am only Ag and not Au or Pt, so it appears that I will have little to no success at redeeming miles.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:33 am
How is not showing all the available flights for low Skymiles bookings doing “a better job of assisting more customers in planning their travel”?
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:40 am
Since we now have to search every single day to find that partner carrier flight, it only seems fair that you drop the nonrefundable $25 partner fee. Why should I have to pay in my time for searching for these flights when the calendar should work and tell me, and after all that searching, pay again?
March 3rd, 2009 at 11:02 am
Adam91281,
I’ve had similar experiences. It is extremely pathetic that Northwest’s and Continental’s calendars do a better job searching for Delta award tickets THAN DELTA’S OWN CALENDAR! Delta has to create a world class way of purchasing award tickets. Right now, it’s almost like Delta is the first airline to use a brand new technology. Delta, fix the problem correctly like the world’s largest airline would. This is really rediculous.
March 3rd, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Josh i agree with all these comments. Delta is now the world’s largest airline and SkyMiles the largest FF program. However, your loyal members cannot redeem their miles online, it’s almost impossible and we are forced to pay a $25 fee. Are there plans to leverage off of the NWA calendar? How about looking at Continental’s technology as well. One other thing i wanted to bring to your attention. If you are lucky enough to find a flight and put it on hold, when you go to make any changes the system seems like it is searching for the new dates / cities but instead it returns to the itinerary homepage and states that your award is on hold. No search or alternate dates/routings are given.
March 3rd, 2009 at 1:21 pm
The 3 tier system just simply doesn’t work and neither do these proposed changes. The so called ‘low’ period never match the what low should be on the delta skymiles award chart, and if they are available it is only on partner airlines which always requires a fee. NWA.com is far easier and less frustrating and soon that will be all we have as Continental join Star Alliance.
I’m even hoping that in the future we can book partner airline flights through delta.com even if they are not a codeshare flight. Unfortunately Delta.com is a long way behind other websites.
March 4th, 2009 at 8:36 am
There seems to be a common theme here! Since DL & NW have merged, why don’t you give up on the delta.com calendar, scrap it, and adopt the nwa.com calendar application?
March 6th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
Add my vote for the nwa.com search engine. Last year I booked 2 trips on nwa.com instead of delta.com simply because the same flights came up (incl. DL segments) at lower award pricing.
If you can’t make the calendar show accurate data, just scrap it. I still don’t understand why Delta won’t let me SPECIFY price (in miles) online? It’s kind of stupid to select “price in miles is important to me”, then you select LOW, and then get a bunch of ridiculously high priced results.
If I am allowed to specify 25K miles for my round-trip domestic economy ticket, then please search DL, NW, and all the other partner airlines for an itinerary that will match. If you can do it over multiple days, even better. It can’t be that difficult – the agents can do it at the desk. Oh, but then I’ll get charged a fee for that “privelege”, even though I’ve been a Platinum for years and a Million Miler.
With the introduction of 3 tiers, some of the award levels quietly went up, i.e. now 60K miles for economy to Europe instead of 50K. Sometimes you gotta wonder if DL is purposefully making it difficult to find the low award levels to force people to use more miles.
One more comment: For London, England, why can’t I just enter LON to search both Gatwick and Heathrow, like other online booking sites?
Thanks for listening.
March 7th, 2009 at 7:08 am
Wrong changes, wrong direction. You expect us to pay an extra “partner booking fee” in exchange for substandard capabilities? Then folks conclude that your website is hopeless, they get socked for telephone booking fees as well.
NW has it down, if only DL had the sense to use it.
March 9th, 2009 at 10:19 am
I would only echo what my fellow flyers are saying, and add that the feature to “mix and match” coach & business is badly flawed as well. I generally have to tinker with my calendar search about three different ways before I can get it to understand that I want my inbound flight in coach and return in business, or vice versa. And sometimes I have to just hold the whole thing in business and call an agent to change one leg to coach, and then log back in and redeem online to avoid paying the over-the-phone fee. Exceptional technology is hard to perfect, but you guys seem to be teetering between trying to do too much (and failing), and not doing enough (and disappointing your best customers who have so many miles to redeem). Maybe go with NWA or hire another developer?
March 9th, 2009 at 11:22 am
I’m more or less wondering why even bother? You are still switching to NW’s website correct? DL’s website has so many bugs in it still, especially if you have a widescreen monitor the website desplays incorrectly (in IE 7 or 8, or Firefox it doesn’t matter) Trying to change your iten on DL.com is impossible it never works (see FlyerTalk and Airliners.net for issues about that). After all this is supposed to be taking best from both companies, of which from a customer stand point the only two things DL has brought from NW is free wifi in clubs and bringing in MLT Vacations as taking over Delta Vacations, but everything else has been dropped or not taken up, I have heard of the big debate about PARS. Also I have heard that the pilots group will be using a bidding system that is 4 generations older than the current one that NW pilots are using now… but thats not about DL.com or NWA.com
March 9th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Josh, can you reply to some of these comments? As a Plat member as well i think it’s outrageous that i cannot book award travel on my own. The system either comes back with no flights (when NWA shows them …even Delta ones), wrong prices, or just errors out. You are basically forcing us to pay a penalty fee to agents to book our awards for us.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:11 am
I also find it disappointing that it is STILL impossible to search metropolitan area airports when booking award tickets. For example, I should be able to type in NYC and the computer will check availability out of HPN, LGA, JFK, and EWR at the same time. Other airlines, as a matter of fact, EVERY OTHER MAJOR U.S. AIRLINE has had this feature for ages! Get with it Delta.
March 12th, 2009 at 9:33 am
Hi Skymiler, You do have the ability to search multiple airports, such as LON for the London area or NYC for the New York area on delta.com. I blogged about it on April 1st of last year (but it was not an April fools joke!). Try it out next time you book online!
March 12th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Katie,
I was referring to Award Ticket Reservations. It is not possible to search multiple airports on Delta.com’s Award Ticket search engine. Take a look. https://www.delta.com/awards/home.do?EventId=ENTER_APPLICATION
March 12th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Aaah, my apologies. I’ll leave that to Josh to address then.
Thanks, Skymiler. Appreciate your (and everyone’s) feedback as always.
March 15th, 2009 at 11:56 pm
Josh,
Please listen to this. I think the solution to this problem is actually very simple. For all I know, it may already be the plan. Inherit Northwest’s ENTIRE Award travel booking system. It seems to work flawlessly! In addition it really allows passengers to search for the flight they REALLY want. (Nonstop, multiple airport search, etc.) I will be very disappointed if Delta does not do this.
It would also be nice if we could hear a response from you. Isn’t that the point of this bog, or am I missing something?
-Skymiler
March 16th, 2009 at 7:00 am
Simple question, after Josh posts his statements for the information, does anyone from Delta view the comments, responds to comments or atleast provide some clarifications based upon the comments of those whom are participating at this blog.
I am not blog savvy, but the original posted date of Josh is March 2nd, today is March 16. Therefore, two weeks have passed with folks responding with very constructive ideas, opinions, but if nobody responds to these comments, why does Delta has a blog?
Possibly, the reasoning of having a Delta blog is to tell a message with or without responses?
If that is true, then is it just not that much better for someone like Josh to simply insert his message within one of the Delta newsletters itself?
I just want to know, if all Delta blog entries have guys posting messages, and whether nobody from Delta actually participates in these blogs?
I viewed very informative responses, such as Northwest have a much better process to satisfy the masses for redemption awards,i believe.
So, if i understand correctly, if NW and Delta are to become one, why would any merger perfer the inferior method for awards.
Kindof like if it is not broken, why re-invent something that appears to be worse?
Josh, tell me what is going to occur once each and every NW-Delta combined team gets together completely, are yourselves intending upon trashing all the inferior methods of either website, and only keep what is good, meaning if this new procedure you are discussing is inferior based upon some of these response, WHY would you then not just cease wasting company monies on ideas that do not function and instead reap the benefits of the combined good procedures from both airlines?
Since both airlines are to have the same bosses, why not have some meeting to trash out any and all things that are inferior and re-apply only the things that do not fail.
Maybe, i am simply reading too much into your original post and viewing all the responses, but since two weeks have passed since your original post and having provided no responses, i am thinking that instead maybe this style of blog announcement is simply an announcement and responses are not reviewed by folks at Delta?
Personally, i only want both Delta and Northwest to adopt only procedures that succeed, good today and perceived to be good tomorrow, bad today, trash it tomorrow.
Why open a can of worms when two groups of airlines are meant to succeed on the successes of both and trash anything you already know that fails.
enough said, simply wanted to know if the only communications from these blog messages are from those whom read the announcements and nobody responds them such as yourself, Josh?
My ideas for a successful merger is only merge good stuff, trash the rest.
Anyone can become the world’s largest airline and ff program, but once you are on top of the mountain, it is always harder to stay there.
I say, grab response ideas, comment on them and weed out those future perceived ideas that appear that may fail.
Why waste company resources re-inventing the wheel when your invention still needs spokes..
the end.
March 16th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Hi all,
I’m glad my last post generated such enthusiastic discussion! Here are answers to a few of your specific questions (which I’ve paraphrased), with more to come later this week:
Q: Why did Josh take so long to reply to comments following his previous post?
A: I’ve been out of the country for seven days without reliable internet access! I don’t delegate blog posting, so it had to wait until my return (late last night). I do apologize that you had to wait so long.
Q: Can you use the nwa.com award functionality instead of Delta’s?
A: That’s exactly what we’re working on. As we integrate NWA.com into delta.com, major components of Delta’s SkyMiles functionality will be driven by systems developed at NW that are being integrated with Delta’s booking systems (Deltamatic). One of the (many) benefits of this merger is that we can benefit from the experience and skills our team members from both DL and NW, and—where possible—ensure the best functionality is either preserved or rebuilt going forward.
Q: I just want to know, if all Delta blog entries have guys posting messages, and whether anybody from Delta actually participates in these blogs?
A: Actually, we read every comment you post here, and while we’re not able to address every comment with an individualized reply, we do discuss your feedback in out team meetings. It’s one of many sources of direct customer input we use as we plan our work here at delta.com.
Q: (a comment, actually) “From a customer standpoint, the only two things DL has brought from NW is free wifi in clubs and bringing in MLT Vacations as taking over Delta Vacations”
A: In a future post, we’ll talk about some of the many good things DL’s incorporating from NW. The list of customer products and amenities that will make their way into the new Delta is very long (easily numbering in the hundreds), and the teams working on them—in every area and at every level—are made up of employees with experience at both airlines…as well as Western, Pan Am, Northeast, Republic, National, and many more (not to mention other industries).
Thanks again for your posts…I’ll be back later this week with more.
Josh
March 16th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
So the current state of Delta’s Award Booking is only temporary? Soon, Delta will use Northwest’s systems?
March 17th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
Josh when you reply later in the week can you include a proposed time-line as well? As everyone has said here we are having problems with easy domestic DELTA bookings as well not just partner flights. I think a lot of us have frustration right now around not being able to book our own travel. Thanks
March 21st, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Everyone here makes good points. I thought I was a ninja when it came to booking award travel thru Delta.com. Seems like I am a novice compared to most of you. For me it boils down to patience and checking preferred dates and times 2-3x per day for 4 or 5 days and then my preferred flights eventually appear. Example: I am booing LAX _ NCE in June and found what I wanted on AF (more comfortable biz seats).
In conclusion, I want to let DL know that the award section of the site is better than it was.
I look fwd to checking out the NWA site to see how it compares.
March 24th, 2009 at 11:12 am
Hi all,
RICKL, thanks for noticing the progress! We’ve made several changes to the calendar over the past few weeks, and we believe the results should speak for themselves. If you are experiencing a specific issue, you can e-mail us (link below) or click the “Feedback” icon on the right side of the page…we read all of these messages and can usually re-play your session to better understand what’s going on.
And to answer the question from Adam91281, we are integrating delta.com and nwa.com this year, to launch in early 2009. Elements of the merged experience have already launched (e.g. linking of SkyMiles/WorldPerks accounts), other features will come throughout the year. Check the Merger FAQs link for updates on many topics.
Thanks again for everyone’s interest and feedback. Josh
August 11th, 2011 at 1:21 pm
PM & DM flyers are so happy about the 72 hr rule:
http://travel.usatoday.com/alliance/flights/boardingarea/post/2011/08/The-Wandering-Aramean—Delta-locks-down-award-changes-close-to-departure/414428/1
How many top flyers will DL have to say bye bye to before this changes?!?
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta-skymiles/1246062-updated-award-redeposit-reissue-rule-change.html