Delta is notorious for having poor value redemptions so it’s no surprise that the best way to book Delta… is not with their own miles. Fellow Skyteam members like Virgin Atlantic and Air France will often have better redemption rates on Delta flights than Delta itself. Let’s get into what’s the best way to find this availability.
Virgin Atlantic’s Nifty Calendar Search Tool
Virgin Atlantic actually provides a terrific (lesser known) award search tool for their own flights and also Delta flights to the UK.
However, this search tool can be “hacked” to search Delta award space for any Delta operated route. Yup you read that right.
When operating the tool, if you pick any of the dropdown options and click search, you’ll get taken to a URL like so.
There are two fields in the URL that you are care about.
- origin
- destination
Let’s say we want to find Delta First Class availability between Los Angeles (LAX) and New York (JFK). I will modify the origin and destination fields in the URL to use my desired 3 letter airport codes. Make sure to use upper case when inputting these airport codes. The updated URL will look like this.
You can leave the month and year fields as is because you can update them later. Using this URL will take you to a page like this.
Look how easy it is to spot available Delta awards. The main things to note are:
- You can search the previous and next month with the buttons in the upper right
- The breakdown of available seats by cabin is shown
- Color coded award space summary shown for convenience
With this tool, we can now quickly find that in August, there is some upper class award space, as seen below.
Once you’ve located the date(s) with your desired availability, you can then go back to the main Virgin Atlantic website, or any other partner’s website and plug in those dates and book.
For example, using the above date above of 8/13/2024, we can pull up this availability on Virgin Atlantic’s website.
Compare this exact same flight on Delta’s website.
Even with the Delta card discount, Virgin Atlantic’s pricing is still cheaper lol.
However, whatever space Virgin Atlantic sees, should also show up on the other Delta partners as well. Take for example Air France.
From this example, the cheapest way to book this Delta flight is via Air France’s Flying Blue program and we can save 50,000 miles compared to if we had used Skymiles!
You can also actually use this hack to search Delta partner availability for Delta’s international routes as well. For example, here is a search for Los Angeles (LAX) to Sydney (SYD).
Conclusion
This is a super easy way to search Delta’s availability via partners and is a good tool to be aware of. Let me know if you find any good awards with this method!
