When Delta Mileage Upgrade Awards Don’t Work

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Delta Mileage Upgrade Award

If you’re hoping to use Delta SkyMiles to waitlist for an upgrade, read this caution first…

Delta Mileage Upgrade Awards

My wife and I have had fantastic success using Delta Global Upgrade certificates to fly business class between the US and Europe. Diamond elite members can optionally receive 4 global upgrade certificates each year. The certificates can be used to upgrade any purchased fares except basic economy, bulk fares, or unpublished fares (Delta Vacation deals sometimes fall in this category). If an upgrade isn’t available at the time of purchase, the certificate can be used to get on the waitlist for the upgrade. Then, if upgrades don’t clear before the flight, you are put on the airport standby upgrade list. When we’ve used these for flights to and from Europe, every upgrade has eventually cleared. Some cleared at the time of booking. Some cleared a few weeks later. And one cleared at the gate. In that case, the upgrade certificate was never properly removed from my wife’s account. We didn’t complain.

For a recent trip to Europe, my wife wanted to upgrade to business class in both directions, but she only had one upgrade certificate left (the same one mentioned above that wasn’t removed after use). A seeming solution was to use miles to upgrade one direction of the trip. For international flights, you must book Y, B, M, H, Q, or K class in order to apply a mileage upgrade award. And it turned out that her preferred outbound flight (but not her return) booked into an eligible class (maybe Q — I don’t remember). So, I called Delta and asked about mileage upgrade options. Delta demands an outrageous price of 60,000 SkyMiles to ugprade flights to Europe in one direction, but in this case we were willing to pay it.

The good news was that the return flight was instantly upgradeable and we used my wife’s last upgrade certificate to do so. The bad news was that the outbound was not confirmable, but there were many Delta One seats available on the flight. I’ve never used a Delta Mileage Upgrade before and was surprised to learn that they could be used to waitlist her upgrade. I asked three agents whether the chances of waitlists clearing were the same with mileage upgrade awards as with upgrade certificates and all three agreed that they were. Great. I figured that she was all set. But I didn’t read the fine print…

On Delta’s Mileage Upgrade Awards page the devious little detail that undid my wife’s upgrade chances are proudly displayed on line 9, under Terms & Conditions:

9. Airport Standby: Mileage Upgrade Awards do not carry over to the Airport Standby List.

This little term makes all the difference in the world. My wife’s ugprade didn’t clear in advance. And when she checked in for her flight she discovered that she wasn’t on the upgrade list at all. There were still quite a few business class seats available, but despite pleading with Delta agents she wouldn’t get to sit in one. Afterwards, she reported that she was unable to get any sleep at all on the overnight flight. The good news? We saved 60,000 Delta SkyMiles and she met a nice couple sitting beside her in Comfort+.

Bottom line: If you’ve booked an upgradeable fare and want a business class upgrade, don’t count your upgrade chickens if you waitlist with a mileage upgrade award.

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