No, you are not seeing things. Delta has dropped the award ticket price for some west coast short hops, including the Delta “shuttle” between LAX & SFO to just 5k each way.
Yep, you can get a round trip Delta SkyMiles award for just 10,000 points all in (plus a few bucks tax).
Now part of this may be due to new dynamic pricing kicking in. After all, if you happen to have a Delta SkyMiles credit card and can do “pay with miles” you are only talking 15,000 miles to pay for this ticket in full (or you can just buy it for $144 cash).
This is very interesting to see and I will have a much longer post touching on this topic as well as my thoughts on all the controversy about the possible change to 25,000 point base Level 1 Delta award tickets tomorrow! Stay tuned :-)- René
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I haven’t been able to replicate this on any other route than LAX-SFO. e.g. doesn’t work on SAN-LAX
@econjon – Here is another example.
Maybe this sounds weird, but somehow this sudden magnanimous move on Delta’s part makes me really suspicious. Sad to say, but I really can’t see Delta making a change like this out of altruism.
Was searching flights SYD-LAX on VA 12/31 and some other dates and the partner award was 50,100 miles. A small change, but shows that DL is playing around with award prices.
This is simply something similar to the Southwest pricing model being phased in, right? 10,000 miles for a trip that’s only $144 in cash is a 1.44 cpm valuation. Based on this, watch for a $500 ticket to go for around 35,000 miles. Isn’t this a logical next step after the elimination of award charts – award values linked closely to the cost of cash tickets? Valuable premium seat redemptions have a very short life expectancy, it would appear.
@DaveS – It is starting to seem that way. The sad part is, Delta will get crushed doing this. They will price business class out of the market and offer NO real 1st class product and if they did it would cost 1 million $kyRubles to fly it. 🙁
I don’t know if they would go that far. It is still in their interest to keep SkyMiles at least marginally competitive with other airlines’ programs.
@William – I think you need to re-think. $kyRubles are already not marginally competitive with many other airlines award programs like American or Alaska!
I’ve noticed for the past two months delta slowly phasing in the price per mile to be about 1.4 cents. For instance trying to get a first class ticket from MSP to phx next January for a long weekend requires 75k for nearly all dates. Switch to pay with cash and the price for rt first is either $750 or $800. Needless to say I burned up all remaining miles and switched to earning on Alaska.
Hmmmm…now that everyone is mentioning it…I booked a close-in award ticket in 1st (so we could sit together) and it’s almost exactly 1.4cpm. (110,000 from LAX-CHI RT lololol)…whatever, I’ve never actually redeemed miles for my own travel every in my life.