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.

Yesterday on “Delays of Our Lives” . . . after a few rounds of going back and forth, it became clear that Kate Hanni has boiled down long onboard delays on simple overscheduling. I definitely disagree. Today we pick up where we left off. The next question in my mind was obvious . . .

Cranky: So it’s back to the overscheduling issue. If that’s the case, then why do a 3 hour rule instead of slot controls?
Kate: First, some people think 3 hours is too much. Let me give you an example. Imagine if we had sat 179 minutes in San Francisco before takeoff for New York. Imagine that we sat 179 minutes in the plane and then we took off and flew for 4 hours and then we diverted to Austin. Then we took off and spent 179 minutes on taxi-in in New York and we’re still under the rule guidelines. And the airlines will have broken no law.

Cranky: Come on, that’s an incredibly rare situation where something like that would happen.
Kate: No it’s not that rare. And here’s my argument about that. I said have it your way, it’s rare. If it’s rare it will have no impact. The airlines wouldn’t be fighting this if it were so rare. The data you see doesn’t show everything.

Cranky: What is it missing?
Kate: International flights are not included at all. Also, it only includes domestic airlines that have at least 1% of the air travel revenue in the country. I would say that 300% of flights that are sitting on the tarmac are not included in the data.

Cranky: How do you know that?
Kate: There are approximately 150 air carriers in the US and only 19 report.

Cranky: Yeah, but most of the airlines that fly into slot constrained airports report. Who cares if some small airline reports in some tiny town?
Kate: I’ll give you an example. Spirit Air doesn’t report because they’re just under the threshold but they’ve had long delays recently.

Cranky: Back to the 3 hour rule. Why is this better way to handle it than just putting slots at the airports?
Kate: It would have been better if the government stepped in and regulated congestion effectively but they didn’t. The Bush Administration didn’t want to do that, so this is the only thing that can be done since the airlines have refused voluntarily to reduce capacity.

Cranky: But airlines have agreed to voluntarily reduce capacity. United and American did it in O’Hare. There are caps in place at Newark . . .
Kate: It was a failure. When the DOT asked if some airlines would reduce their schedules, they did and then other airlines grew.

Cranky: Ok, so let’s say that we have scheduled everything perfectly to match capacity. But what about when bad weather comes in and reduces capacity? You can’t schedule for that and delays can happen. What do you do?
Kate: Those types of problems are caused by extreme weather, and the GAO says that 7% of airline delays are caused by extreme weather. . .

Cranky: That’s not true. Look at San Francisco, for example. You get some fog in there and they lose half their capacity. That’s not extreme weather.
Kate: We have very few complaints from San Francisco. I’m talking about extreme weather that causes delays over 3 hours. The airlines and their station manager and operations manager have a meeting several times a day as to what’s going to be coded as weather. Occasionally you’re going to have mechanical delays and weather delays, but they can code it however they want.

Cranky: But do we really need this? I mean, haven’t things changed since you were stuck in Austin? Haven’t the airlines made changes?
Kate: They haven’t changed anything. Nothing has changed except they’re fighting us tooth and nail. Just on the last trip I was going to do a report card in Washington DC. I called Delta to make sure my flight was going to be on time and they said that there was going to be a four hour delay but they hadn’t notified me. They said they didn’t have a crew. I asked how they knew they’d have a crew in four hours? The agent said, “We should probably tell you it’ll be indefiinitely.” I think they just told me because I’m a consumer advocate.

Cranky: I know that if I was on a flight that hit the 3 hour mark, I’d rather wait 20 minutes to take off then go back to the gate and not be able to fly for days because the flight canceled.
Kate: But would you want to be there for nine hours?

Cranky: No, but come on. That’s incredibly uncommon if it happens at all.
Kate: Nine hour delays happen a lot.

Cranky: I’d like to see those numbers.
Kate: I don’t have them with me, but I’ll be back at my computer in a couple hours and I’ll send them to you.

Cranky: Great, I look forward to seeing that. Thanks for talking with me.

She did send me her data in the form of her 2009 Airline Report Card (PDF), but it didn’t look as bad as she said. Though she mentioned that nine hour delays “happen a lot,” there were only 13 delays of over 5 hours at the top 35 airports for all of 2009. In addition, for all the reporting airlines, there were 904 delays of over 3 hours. That may sound like a lot, but that was out of 6,450,285 flights. Yes, it’s a very small number.

Some of the things she mentions show a lack of understanding of how the system works. For example, when I mentioned that San Francisco fog problems can cause delays, she said that she doesn’t get many complaints from there so that’s not the problem. Of course that’s the case. The delay is usually on inbound flights because of the visibility issues, and airplanes have to be held at their departure point if it’s bad enough. That can cause congestion at some of the other airports, and if there’s weather elsewhere, it can snowball.

She acts like the airlines haven’t done anything since she was stuck on a plane, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Most airlines had some sort of policy before, but those have been strengthened with public policies and stronger chain-of-command to ensure it doesn’t happen. Is it perfect? Of course not. Airlines are incredibly complex and operate all over the world. It’s not possible to ensure that things never go wrong, but it is possible to keep working as hard as possible to reduce long delays from occurring.

Though Kate blames everything on airline scheduling practices, it’s the variability of operational capacity that makes things tougher. If the winds shift, your capacity can go down. If rain turns to ice, you have a mess on your hands. What this rule is going to do is encourage airlines to operate more conservatively to make sure they don’t face fines, and that will mean more cancellations.

It’s not like you can just magically open the door at 3 hours on the ground. Planes will now need to be called back starting around 2 hours to make sure that they can get out of line, taxi back and get doors open in time to avoid the fine. Once that door opens, the pilots are likely to time out. Without a crew, that flight is more likely to cancel and then people are stuck.

I continue to predict that we will see more cancellations and more unhappy passengers than we see today. If overscheduling really were the issue, this isn’t the way to handle it. That’s what slot controls are for, but they still will never be able to match demand with the ever-changing airport capacity during changing weather situations. It’s just the nature of the industry, and all airlines, airports, and air traffic control can do is keep working to try to make it run more smoothly. Blanket rules like this don’t help.

The three-hour ramp delay rules will go into effect next month, and we’re starting to hear the grumbling from around the industry get louder about what it’s going to mean. New Continental CEO Jeff Smisek has kicked off the love fest by saying that these new rules will mean more flight cancellations. JetBlue and Delta have already applied for exemptions because of the runway work being done at JFK, and I fully expect this to be the tip of iceberg. It’s going to get ugly.

Regular readers of the blog know that I’m not a fan of the Passenger Bill of Rights. On the other side, we have Kate Hanni who thinks it’s absolutely necessary. When I saw this quote from Kate Hanni, founder of FlyersRights.org and stranded passenger back in 2006, I just had to talk to her.

Passenger advocates say that airlines don’t need to cancel flights to prevent tarmac delays. “This is solvable” without excess cancellations, said Kate Hanni, who founded Flyersrights.org after a flight she was on in 2006 was stranded.

Oh, really? I had to learn what her solution was here since nobody else seems to know it, so I called her up. Here’s the first part of our conversation. Part Two will go live tomorrow.

Cranky: Hello Kate. I saw you quoted as saying that this new rule shouldn’t be a big issue and that it won’t cause more cancellations, so I’m hoping you can explain how that’s the case.
Kate: They’re trying to convince the American people to be very afraid. See, they should have canceled flights already. They should have depeaked their schedules in New York, Atlanta, Dallas, and all the other airports where they schedule too many flights at one time but they haven’t done it. No measures have worked to get them to reduce their schedules. Are you aware of what the schedules look like at JFK? Are you aware that in the best of all conditions, the airlines can only have 81 flights per hour? Airlines overschedule in the morning. If they were to wait until 9 or 10am, this wouldn’t be a problem.

Cranky: Well, the problem is that people don’t want to fly at those times.
Kate: A lot of people would want to be flying at those times. The airlines drum up demand, get flights but they don’t have room. I know that if I could get a cheaper flight at 10am than 7am, I would.

Cranky: Leisure travelers yeah but business travelers not so much.
Kate: I’m a business traveler and I know. I have to fly from San Francisco to New York all the time. My husband is a business traveler as well and we would both fly at different times.

Cranky: But delays aren’t always the airlines’ fault. There are others responsible for these issues as well.
Kate: The airlines entirely control from the pushback of the plane out until the penalty box.

Cranky: But if they don’t push back, they don’t get in line for takeoff.
Kate: Trust me that I know exactly what’s going on. I have maps of the no-movement areas versus the movement areas. I’ve sat down with MIT professors and air traffic controllers and they say this is the way it is. It’s one of their own [airline] employees that’s telling that jet to push back from the gate and sit. Air traffic control has nothing to do with the movement of that jet.

Cranky: Wait, how often do you see an airplane push back but they don’t want to take off?
Kate: Approximately 10 times a day. Mostly in New York. We see it happen a lot at Reagan, even at Dallas. A lot at Chicago.

Cranky: But hold on. Why would an airline push this plane back and sit there for no reason?
Kate: Money. If they let you off the plane, if they leave you in the terminal, you have choices. You could migrate to a different airline. Migrate to a rental car, migrate to a train. You might say that I’ll try a different carrier.

Cranky: But no airline wants to push back and just sit there. Why would they push back if they weren’t trying to take off?
Kate: Because they’re clearing gates so incoming jets can clear gates. But the second reason is that they don’t want you leaving.

Cranky: Let me try to explain my question better. You say that the airlines are at fault for keeping airplanes sitting on the ground and it’s not air traffic control’s fault. Airlines want to get airplanes moving so they can pick up their next planeload of paying passengers, so why would they just push back and not take off if it’s not air traffic control causing the hold ups?
Kate: They do want to take off but they can’t because there are too many flights scheduled. Every morning at many many airports there is overscheduling in the best of all conditions and those planes are not going to take off. [The airlines] are going to grab revenue and then keep it.

Tomorrow, we’ll pick up where we left off. As you can see, Kate has basically boiled this down to, in her eyes, a simple issue of overscheduling. If the airlines would simply change their flights to go at off-peak times, everything would be solved. But there is a problem. Despite what Kate and her husband are willing to do, most business travelers, the bread and butter of most airlines, aren’t going to be that flexible. This is especially true on the short haul flights because people want to be able to do day trips. It’s even worse in New York because of all the competition.

Let’s forget that the afternoons are the worst times in New York and not the mornings and use Kate’s example. Right now, US Airways has its first flight to LaGuardia at 748a and its second at 1021a. If US Airways gets rid of that 748a flight, all those business travelers looking for a day trip will head over to Newark to take the 805a on Continental. US Airways is not going to do that.

If overscheduling truly is the biggest issue and not anything else (which is somewhat debatable), then the question should be why the government hasn’t instituted more strict slot controls instead of this rule. That would more directly address the problem instead of this rule, which will have far more unintended consequences for travelers. It will, of course, not help when weather goes bad and airport capacity gets reduced, so there’s no magic bullet.

These are the questions that I ask in Part Two, which will be posted tomorrow.

If you’re one of the 5,000 Cranky subscribers out there, you probably don’t see anything different. But, if you’re one of the tens of thousands of others who come directly to the site, you’ll notice a new, cleaner look. Many will say it’s about time.

The width is a bit wider, and the header is a bit smaller. I’ve switched fonts around and made colors a bit softer. I also have some new flexibility with the sidebars that should come in handy at some point. Overall, I think it’s a good look that’s just an update on what already worked well. So why’d I change?

Well, the last version broke. Seriously. I couldn’t fix the single post pages, so I just started over with a new theme that’s been heavily modified.

The one potentially controversial move is the addition of threaded comments. Now you’ll be able to reply directly to a specific comment and have it appear directly beneath that. In fact, you can go up to 5 layers deep, so I think this will help facilitate conversation. Others may disagree.

Take a look around, press buttons, and then let me know what you like or you don’t like. If you really hate it, well, you can always become a subscriber instead.

Send the good, bad, and the broken to cf@crankyflier.com. Hope you like it.