DL internal US flights on VS 'M' fare bookings

I just booked (or rather paid for, after two weeks in the VS IT system!) a three-sector multi-city ticket based around a transatlantic VS economy 'M' fare return.

The process threw up quite a few interesting things, which might be of use to others on this board.

It took a while to explain it all on the phone, but this is what I wanted:

A. LHR-SFO in April (VS M bucket)

B. SFO-JFK in May (DL any economy fare, hoping to use my VS Au to
upgrade on the day; if not, then settle for Economy Comfort)

C.JFK-LHR in June (VS M bucket)

This all came in at about £950 (a bargain in its own right). I then upgraded the two VS legs to UC Gs for an extra £150 and 45k miles, bringing us to around £1,100 for the three flights. All good.

Two interesting points:

1) The DL sector adds practically nothing to the overall fare (maybe £20 or less, I can't quite remember; but I did ask as I was tempted to book JetBlue's new Mint class for the SFO-JFK sector).

For those interested in exploring the US, you can keep adding DL sectors for effectively nothing (£0-30 per sector), although not all are released to VS for codeshares, so it's a bit hit and miss. What comes up on ITA Matrix doesn't quite match what DL actually releases to VS for booking as a multi-city fare.

2) When booking the VS legs in 'M' this also puts the DL sector(s) in the Economy 'M' bucket (which could well be a mistake, as VS and DL 'M' buckets are not really equivalent). This has a bunch of benefits, depending on where you're flying.

For a start, if in DL 'M', you get a free upgrade to 'Economy Comfort', without having to be VS Au. This means that if you're in a Business Elite plane (i.e. transcon ex-JFK/SFO/LAX/SEA), you get the brand new 'enhanced' Economy Comfort: in addition to the slightly better seat, you get free booze, food, pillow, blanket, quasi-meal, amenity kit etc. It's no VS PE, of course, but it's significantly better than economy where you have to pay for everything. And for a five hour flight, it's just fine for me...

Details here under 'Discounts': http://www.delta.com/content/www/en_US/ ... rison.html

If you're VS Au, you'd get the Economy Comfort/Sky Priority upgrade free anyway, but you're also on the automatic upgrade list for upgrade to First on non BusinessElite flights. And with an 'M' fare, although below many of the DL status holders, you're no longer rock bottom on the upgrade list.

If you happen to have DL miles, you should also - I think - be able to upgrade the DL 'M' sector to First or BusinessElite (although availability will be scarce). You cannot, though, pay for an upgrade.

--

Hope this might be of use to some!

NYLON

Very interesting and noteworthy points. Those transcon EC perks for non Au come in at $99 or so per person so it's almost like they're paying you to go multi city!

Thanks, Syrome.

Of course it's all 'pending availability' which means anyone thinking of doing this will need to spend time going onto the DL seat maps seeing that Economy Comfort is available on the transcon sector (which is what I did).

Which is nothing more complicated than verifying VS G availability prior to purchasing a VS M of course.

One other word of warning: if anything goes wrong, I think you'd be truly stuck. Even just making a gentle inquiry about cash upgrades on the DL 'M' sector led the DL agent to implode: "This is a VS issued ticket, you have to call them." "But they told me to call you." "But it's not our ticket stock. Aaaargh...BOOM!"

One good thing is the DL website. I just loaded up up the VS booking reference once the ticket issued, it immediately came back with the reservation, kindly gave me my separate DL booking reference, and when I went to pick my seats, a white box came on the screen offering free Economy Comfort.

Thanks for this! A lot of these are very interesting points to me as we're likely to book multi-city DL legs within the US.

One other word of warning: if anything goes wrong, I think you'd be truly stuck. Even just making a gentle inquiry about cash upgrades on the DL 'M' sector led the DL agent to implode: "This is a VS issued ticket, you have to call them." "But they told me to call you." "But it's not our ticket stock. Aaaargh...BOOM!"

I've been wondering about this as I'm still considering upgrading our DL SFO > SEA flights in order to get the additional TP. I'll try through VS first and see how it goes.

Spacedog, I imagine your VS and DL fares are through-ticketed, rather than sector-ticketed, which means VS will have to 'undo the stitching' to upgrade your DL sectors, which effectively means recalculating the VS segments. You can't use use VS miles to upgrade a DL sector either.

I'd be interested to know what VS says (as it depends a lot into which bucket your VS sectors are booked), but I imagine it'll be a massive price hike to upgrade the DL sectors.

When I asked VS out of interest how much it would cost to upgrade the DL sector in my booking, above, it was astronomical because they'd have to re-price the entire ticket as a cash fare (losing the M-G upgrades etc).

Your best bet would be to pay for an upgrade on the day for your SFO-SEA DL sector. Obviously this is pending availability, but you'd trump most elites hoping for an upgrade by using cold hard cash!

Thanks for the tips. Out of interest why did it take two weeks in their system?

Hi vanilla8, this kind of ticket requires manual processing for payment and e-ticket issuing by a separate department (Ticketing Dept).

This recent thread explains a little about what I found out!

http://v-flyer.com/forum/index.php?f=4& ... =viewtopic