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Delta and US Airways worst in reward redemption

ByGrace Alexander
a woman wearing a grey jacket

Scott McCartney from the Wall Street Journal recently evaluated airlines for reward redemption.  Among US carriers Southwest and JetBlue topped the charts with Delta and US Airways rounding out the bottom tied for last amount airlines evaluated.

At a recent travel blogging conference many of us were talking about what kind of a traveler we are.  Since I have to travel where I need to go eaca woman wearing a grey jacketh week for work and want to do it as comfortably as possible I’m not a mileage runner kind of flyer and I’m not a churner to get free vacations all on credit card points.  My primary goal is to travel as comfortably as possible and hopefully get first class upgrades often.  This is part of why I changed from crediting to United to US Airways since I fly on US.  This means I’m actually getting upgrades, but I’m not sure how everything will play out booking my next vacation.  I booked my vacation this fall using my remaining United miles since they had low-tier availability and Delta didn’t.  I just keep letting Delta miles build up because I can never use them, but I love flying Delta.

So let me rehash an old meme and point out that McKayla is not impressed with Delta and US.

 

 

7 Comments

    1. @Rene, thanks. They haven’t been logical for where I have gone for my past couple vacations, but I’ll probably use my Delta miles soon for my europe trip next year.

  2. US Airways has more or less the same access to award inventory that United does. The differences in the study are driven by the particular routes picked for each carrier and that they only looked at online award booking (US Airways suffers since they don’t have partner awards on their website).

  3. Oddly ,I have found from my current home airport that Delta offers the lower cost redemption options when compared to UA especially for 3 seats. We’re flying to Tampa next week for less than UA. It would have also been a Delta win if we had wanted to go to SJU in the same time frame.

    Finally looking at Hawaii at thanksgiving, UA is 80k per traveler, Delta 77.5k.

    So it really is a YMMV situation.

  4. Scott McCartney didn’t do anything but publish the (somewhat misguided) results of another company.

    They only searched online; if you call US you’ll have more or less the same inventory as you can get from UA online (no LH F, though). That’s the only real difference.

    1. Yeah. I’ve had no problems using US’s website to search for availability out of CLT. Delta out of CLT requires a phone call to get anything

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