Many of our Cranky Concierge clients come to us looking for help using frequent flier miles. Though we don’t provide nearly the comprehensive service that Gary Leff provides on that front, we can certainly help and have had great success. One thing I’ve found consistently, however, is that Delta SkyMiles are really not easy to burn and when you do, they end up costing a lot more than on other airlines in terms of miles and dollars. As a loyalty program, SkyMiles is hard for me to love as a non-elite. Here’s why.

Mileage Amounts
Delta likes to say that the three-tiered low, medium, and high levels for redemption offer “more flexibility and options.” While that may be true, it actually just means you use more miles for more tickets. Most airlines have a flat structure of 25,000 miles roundtrip domestically for saver awards and 50,000 for standard awards. Delta now has tiers of 25,000; 40,000; and 60,000.

What it looks like from my perspective is that they’ve moved a ton of their inventory into the middle bucket, so you’ll have a very hard time finding the cheap redemptions when compared to other frequent flier programs. You may have more opportunities to pay 40,000 miles instead of 50,000 on other airlines, but on the low end, I’ve had a lot more trouble finding availability.

I’ve worked recently with clients going to Ohio that couldn’t find cheap seats despite other airlines having availability. Another client was traveling on off peak days from Boise to San Francisco and couldn’t find a cheap seat despite ample availability on United. Another client was looking to head over to Tokyo and there was nothing to be found for days, yet other airlines had room to spare.

Could Delta simply be more full? Sure, but it seems to be fairly consistent when I look for different clients.

Flexibility
Both United and American now offer one way awards, but Delta still requires you to use a full roundtrip amount in order to redeem. If availability wasn’t so tight, this wouldn’t be as much of an issue, but it is so it makes it even harder to use your miles. In addition, United’s new miles plus points option offers the flexibility that Delta only gives to holders of its American Express cards. That’s not helpful for the rest of us.

And what if you need to make a change? Delta charges you $100 to make any change to an award ticket. American and United will both allow you to change dates without a fee as long as the cities don’t change.

Extra International Fees
This is a particularly disturbing fee that someone recently brought to my attention. If you’re trying to come in to the US from outside, then you’re going to have a fee for not being an American. They call it an “International Originating Surcharge” and the fee varies. The one that was brought to my attention was on a trip from Amsterdam to San Francisco. Delta actually had low level availability for 60,000 miles, but there is a whopping $309 in fees on top. United was only charging $65 in taxes and fees for the same trip.

As you can see, Delta has made it harder to love their program for the non-elite flier. Elites have a whole different set of issues, but most of us aren’t elite. Most of us just want to use our miles and not have to pay a lot of money to do it. That’s proven to be more difficult with Delta in my recent experience.

[Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/73416633@N00/ / CC BY 2.0]

Delta tries to land new JFK terminal – Crain’s New York Business
I talk to Crain’s about why Delta needs do something with its terminal at JFK.

Flying High: Southwest Airlines Posts Big February Gains – BNET
Southwest saw strong double digit revenue gains in February.

Flying Higher: United Airlines February Revenues Way Up – BNET
United beat Southwest’s numbers and showed that they’re really hitting their stride in the revenue game these days.

Fokker’s Back in the Airplane-Building Game – BNET
Those little Fokkers are looking to start building an updated version of the F70 and F100 planes that haven’t been built for more than a decade.

Massive Snow Means Less Airline Capacity in February – BNET
Feb traffic numbers are in, and what do they have in common? A lot fewer available seat miles.

Mexican’s Leading Low Fare Airline Now Owned by the Richest Man in the World – BNET
Carlos Slim is now the richest man, and he owns an airline, believe it or not.

For those who were hoping to see my CNN International piece on the looming BA strike, I’m sorry but it doesn’t seem to be online.

The DOT has decided that the proposed Delta/US Airways slot swap in New York and Washington is perfectly acceptable . . . as long as the airlines agree to sell off a bunch of the slots to new entrants first. I will be shocked if the airlines go for it, and that means that basically nobody wins. Way to go, DOT. (You can read the full ruling here.)

First, let’s refresh our memories on the details of the plan. US Airways will give up 125 slot pairs at LaGuardia along with terminal space. In return, Delta will give up 42 slot pairs at Washington/National and route authorities to Sao Paulo and Tokyo/Narita. The idea was to let each airline play to its strengths in its largest markets.

Delta has been focused on “winning” New York, as we all know by now. This was going to let them serve more cities from New York than they do now, and they said it would also let them move some flights from JFK to LaGuardia in order to focus on the international hub operation at JFK. They were going to maintain flights to the markets which US Airways was leaving but they would use regional jets instead of turboprops.

Down in DC, US Airways was much more detailed in its plans. It was going to pick up the markets that Delta left, but it was also going to add service to 8 cities that don’t see nonstop service from National today. The Tokyo and Sao Paulo flights were independent, but important for them to grow their international presence in markets that are highly restricted.

The plan seemed very smart to me. There are a lot more US Airways loyalists in DC and Delta loyalists in New York, so they likely would have been happy to have the additional service from their preferred carriers. Also, additional cities would have seen nonstop service to LaGuardia and National that they don’t see today.

But now, my guess is that this plan blows up unless Delta and US Airways figure out a way to sway the DOT’s opinion. Why do I say that? Well, the DOT was fine with the plan as long as the airlines sell off some slots first. They had the biggest concern in Washington where they required Delta to sell a full third (14) of the 42 slot pairs first. US Airways will have to sell off 20 slot pairs in New York.

And these aren’t just slot sales. They are sales to airlines that hold less than 5% of the slots at each airport. No cheating allowed – the sales can’t be to any airline that is owned by Delta/US Airways or even one that codeshares with them. That pretty much means it has to be to a low cost carrier.

If you’re US Airways, would you agree to give up 14 slot pairs to an airline that is likely going to compete with you head-on just to get 28 slot pairs? I think not. What’s worse is that the low cost carrier would undoubtedly just add service on routes that already have flights today. The smaller communities would lose out.

So if this holds, I imagine it means that deal is off. In fact, they’ve said as much. US Airways President Scott Kirby said in a letter to the troops,

At this point, while we are still analyzing the DOT’s proposed ruling, we expect that if the DOT’s order is implemented as proposed (there is a 30-day public comment period before the ruling becomes final) the transaction will not go forward.

That means that pretty much everyone loses, except for the DOT which can continue to try to claim that it has saved the traveler from paying high fares, something that I think is questionable. They seem to rest on that fact that higher carrier concentration automatically means higher fares, even if most of the routes will continue to see service by one carrier, just a different one than before. (See my review of competition on these routes.) Is there any salvaging this? I hope so.

One of the complaints the DOT raised in its response is as follows:

While the carriers have made public some of their new intended services, including new service to small communities, they have not released all intended service changes.

However, it is apparent that is the proposed transaction is approved, the carriers will increase the number of markets they serve on a monopoly or dominant basis. As the two carriers reposition at LGA and DCA, there is no assurance that all markets currently being served by the departing carrier will be maintained by the new carrier.

Maybe if Delta and US Airways came out with specific service plans and included a guarantee to serve the smaller communities for a certain amount of time, the DOT would look at this differently. That would be the last gasp that I can imagine. Otherwise, it looks like the deal is dead, and nobody wins.

There are plenty of milestones in any airline merger, but for me, the Delta/Northwest merger just passed some major ones. I now consider Northwest to be dead, and as a passenger, you should too.

So what exactly happened? First of all, nwa.com has now officially been decommissioned. This was the last view of the site before it was shut down early Sunday morning.

If it were as simple as just shutting down a website, Delta would have done this long ago. But when you shut down the site, there are a lot of other pieces that need to fall into place. First of all, Northwest and Delta reservations are now housed on a single system. So (thankfully) no more mixing of Northwest and Delta confirmation numbers for the same reservation.

Also, the famed NW code is toast. If you’ve seen both Northwest and Delta flight numbers for your flights in the past, you won’t anymore. It’s all Delta, all the time. Before nwa.com died, I looked up flight information to see what Northwest flights were planning to operate between LA and Minneapolis on Sunday.

Yep, none. There is no longer such a thing as a Northwest flight. But wait, there’s more.

Along with these changes comes the end of the Northwest call sign. If you listen to Channel 9 on United, you will never hear a pilot call out a Northwest flight number again. They’ll all be using Delta from now. Also, if you use FlightAware or other flight tracking sites, you’ll need to look for Delta flights.

If you had a Northwest confirmation number for an upcoming flight, you’ll want to go make sure you have the Delta one now. And even if you were booked on Delta, it’s worth going back in to double check your flight number. There have been a lot of changes lately as the airline struggled to squeeze all those flights into the finite range of numbers.

So that’s that. Goodbye, Northwest. Your time is up.

Delta may have lost over $1 billion in 2009, but that’s not stopping them from pushing forward on improving their product offerings. In fact, the day before they announced earnings, they also announced a slew of onboard improvements. I’m glad to see it, but there is still one glaring omission here.

Delta is now committing to putting lie flat seats on all 777, 767, and 747 aircraft that fly internationally. That’s great news, because right now it’s a crapshoot on some of these fleets. The 777 LR aircraft have flat beds but the ERs don’t. The 767-400s have some with flat beds but others don’t and the 767-300s don’t. Now all 777s will have the same flat bed while all the 767s will have an alternate flat bed. I think it’s time to break out my old chart, updated with this news:

The big question (literally) is what they’ll put on the 747. They haven’t picked which seat they’ll use, but I’m sure it’ll be completely different from the 767 and 777 just to make things confusing. After all, the cabin width dictated that they use different beds in the 777 than the 767, so I don’t see why that wouldn’t impact the 747 decision as well.

The A330s will apparently still have the old Northwest WorldBusiness seats, and the 757s will keep the old Delta Biz Elite seats. But what about those CRJ-700s?

Ok, so those likely won’t be the exact seats, but Delta is installing First Class on 66 CRJ-700 aircraft operated by Connection carriers. This is undoubtedly meant to compete with United’s ExPlus and American’s recent decision to do the same on its CRJ-700s. These planes are flying more and more longer, former mainline routes so they need something to reward the elites, I suppose.

But what are they doing for the back of the bus? First and most importantly, the 747s and the 767-300s will have audio/video on demand installed at each seat. I assume this is a cost savings, because it gets expensive to pay for the monkeys that actually sit in the projector and run the movie on the big screen today. There is already AVOD in coach on the rest of the international fleet, so that will now be standard.

They’ll also be putting Delta’s blue leather seats on the Northwest fleet (eh, I like cloth) in coach, and more importantly, they’ll be installing the bigger overhead bins on Northwest’s 757s so you can fit rollerbags straight in.

Anything else? Yeah, they’re going to renovate the SkyClub at LAX and open new clubs in Seattle, Philly, and Indianapolis. The Philly one surprises me, but the Indy and Seattle ones don’t. This will be the only lounge in Indy, so that’s nice, and it’s a sign that they aren’t planning on abandoning the city as a little Heartland focus operation. With in-laws in Indy, I’m happy about that.

What’s the one big piece that I said they were missing at the beginning of this post? No word on JFK terminal upgrades. Seriously, this needs to happen. I shot off a question to Delta after seeing nothing regarding New York and they assured me that I’ll be notified as soon as something is ready to announce. You’ll know as soon as I do.