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That will teach me to broadcast on twitter what I am going to blog about in the week ahead! My friend Scott who runs MileValue scooped me and posted already today about a way to put Delta award tickets on “hold” and you can see his post.
I found out about this little gem while doing some award booking and had an error in the process and got the above warning but as you can see by the grayed out box it did create a PNR or a number assigned to the reservation. I then started to play around with ways to recreate this hold since despite what Delta has told us with the change last year on 9SEPT that it would no longer be possible, clearly it is.
It really is very simple to create a 1-2 hour award hold (that is all you get doing it this way). At the last step, after you have filled everything in but have not yet clicked on REDEEM AWARD you simple click somewhere else. Then, when you go to look at your upcoming trips at the Delta home page, you will now see a PNR created for your award ticket but no points will have been removed from your account. It is much harder to trick Delta.com into the 4 hour error hold but I am working on a quicker way to get this too.
Why is such a short hold of any value to us? Keep in mind that AMEX Membership rewards from the NON-Delta AMEX card, i.e. Platinum or Gold, personal or business transfer almost instantly over to Delta.com at a 1:1 rate (there has not been a transfer bonus for a long time now). Thus, let’s say you find the perfect low level seats like I blogged about this morning and have spent hours and hours working on it and want to get some points over or want to real quick call your wife etc. to get the OK to book the tickets, this short hold will do that for you. If not, it just goes away in a few hours from your itineraries!
There is always a way – you just have to know what to do or what to ask for. I find reps will break almost ANY Delta rule for you if you just know how to ask 😉 – René
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@Bob – that is a COMMON error when including partners like KLM! 🙁
Once you have the award ticket on “hold” how do you get it to really book?
@Mark – just go to “My Trips” and you will see it and can redeem it: https://www.delta.com/mytrips/