When I first published this post in March, it was a fun, nerdy exercise without much practical application because Delta hardly ever released Delta One (lie-flat business class) seats to partners. Since then, Delta has become significantly less stingy. Delta business class awards bookable with partner miles are no longer unicorn findings. So, when I recently found a Delta One flight available through Virgin Atlantic which I wanted to book, I came back to this post to see if I could find a way to jettison the outrageous fees. Virgin tends to have very good point-prices for non-stop Delta One flights (especially from the east coast), but award fees are now typically over $1,000! In the past year, you could avoid the worst of those insane surcharges by flying one-way from Europe to the US rather than the other way around. Now, even that option is dead. We’re now seeing fees of over 1,000 Euros for that direction of travel! Further, since I originally published this article, some other tricks no longer work. Neither booking round trip from Europe, nor starting the itinerary with a short flight within Europe work anymore to reduce surcharges. Luckily, there are still a few options that work…
The problem: $1,000+ surcharges
If you’re lucky enough to find Delta One business class available to book through partners, you’ll see that Virgin Atlantic often has excellent point prices, but also devastatingly high surcharges. In this example, it would cost only 57,500 miles to fly Delta One from Detroit to Amsterdam, but it would also cost $1,054 in fees:
Here are a few ways to book Delta One with lower surcharges…
Start your travel outside of the U.S. or Europe
If you find a way to connect to the Delta flight you want by starting outside of the U.S. and Europe, surcharges should be much lower. For example, you can use Virgin Atlantic’s Multi-city search to force a route from Toronto to Detroit in economy and then Detroit to Amsterdam in business class:
This results in fees of $565 CAD (~$415 USD). That’s a huge improvement over $1,050 but it increases the point price to 65,000:
You can drop fees even more by booking two completely separate one-way flights into one itinerary. Again, use the multi-city search to book a trip like this: Bangkok to Ho Chi Minh city in economy; then sometime much later: Detroit to Amsterdam in business class. In this case we’ve dropped the surcharges to $310:
In the examples above, it’s important to understand that you will have to fly the first leg in order to fly the Delta One flight. If you skip that first leg, the rest of the itinerary will be cancelled. As a result, I doubt this trick will be useful to many people, but it was fun (in a very nerdy way) finding it!
In further tests, I found the following:
- Starting the first leg in the US does not work. For example, starting with LAX to MEX or JFK to YYZ doesn’t lower the surcharges.
- Starting with the first leg in Europe no longer works. Originally, booking multi-city Europe to Europe (such as Luxembourg to Amsterdam) and then US to Europe (such as Detroit to Amsterdam) dropped surcharges immensely (in one example, surcharges were below $200).
- Starting from Canada or Mexico and continuing on to Delta One continues to work to lower surcharges.
Book with Air France/KLM Flying Blue miles
If a Delta flight is available to book with Virgin miles, it should also be bookable with Air France/KLM Flying Blue miles. Flying Blue often charges more in miles, but much less in fees. For example, Delta One business class from Detroit to Amsterdam costs 78,000 Flying Blue miles plus $33.
Some Award search tools don’t do a good job of finding Flying Blue’s partner awards like the one shown above. And Flying Blue itself won’t show partner flight prices on their award calendar. So, the most reliable way to find Delta flights bookable with Flying Blue miles is to use an award search tool to find Delta flights bookable with Virgin points and then search for those exact dates on Air France or KLM’s website.
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Great post Greg! I appreciate it.
you lost me right after the part about starting this post in March
That’s a really short-sighted way to look at updated articles. The awards game is always changing, and it sometimes changes month to month, week to week, or day to day and the articles that talk about their specifics need to be updated as frequently. If you are not staying up to date on all the latest tips and tricks, especially for a sweet spot as valuable as the Skyteam partner bookings, which are arguably the some of the easiest most readily available awards in the game, that’s your loss.
hater’s gotta hate
Just booked Delta One last week through Virgin Atlantic BCN to JFK for this July. It was only $178 in taxes and fees (which I felt was crazy cheap through Virgin Atlantic) the points pricing was 57,500k. Not sure if I just got lucky?
Would they not cancel the ticket when you didn’t take the first flight?
Very nice! I’ve been trying to find more AF and all I can find is Delta now. It’s so frustrating.
Nerding out! Love it
Amazing. Does the multi-city trick work from Europe to the US as well?
Here’s an example:
If you want to fly Delta One one-way from Europe to US, the starter flight can’t be in Europe. So, for example, this works:
But this doesn’t work
Love it. This is old school FM
Indeed!
Agreed! Posts like this are sadly few and far between these days.
Demand your money back