I Booked My First Ever Delta Award Ticket

And I was impressed!  Everyone says Delta is so great operationally but many in the travel community affectionately refer to SkyMiles as SkyPesos.

I've been stocking up on Delta SkyMiles over the last year given increased sign-up bonuses from Delta American Express co-brand cards.  Between Emily and I, we were approved for 6 cards last year netting a total of 380,000 SkyMiles from sign-up bonuses alone.  Add in a bit of flying and minimum spend on the cards and we currently have 410,000 SkyMiles.

Delta doesn't publish an award chart which is super annoying.  But I found their online search engine to be quite intuitive and actually pretty easy to find the "cheapest" award ticket.

As I eluded to last week, I'm headed to Seoul later this year for a long weekend solo.  I wanted to use some of my Delta SkyMiles stash so begin looking for options.

Delta options to Seoul

While the cheapest ticket I could find was 185,000 SkyMiles for roundtrip business class, I did see some one-ways as low as 80,000 SkyMiles.  Now you can fly one-way to Seoul on United metal in business class for 65,000 MileagePlus miles and 80,000 on Star Alliance partners or 80,000 on United metal in first class.  You could probably rack up 410,000 United MileagePlus miles fairly easily but I'm out of Chase/United card options since I've had all of them recently.

I ended up spending 210,000 SkyMiles for a bit more comfort.  That's a ride on the upper deck of Delta's soon to be retired 747 to Seoul.  On the way back, Skyteam partner Korean Air's 777-300ER new business class prestige suites which even in a 2-2-2 layout offer everyone direct aisle access.

Korean Air new business class

I was quite pleased with the searching/booking experience and am happy to have a stash of Delta SkyMiles saved up for the next trip.  Stay tuned for all the details about this trip over the next few months.