This should not come as much of a surprise given the rather less than elegant update to the Delta.com website a couple weeks ago, but Delta has now confirmed that stopovers on awards are going away in 2015 as part of the new one way pricing for such trips. And, while awards with stopovers are bookable for the next six weeks, the rules surrounding those have been clarified and tightened as well.
A stopover is allowed, provided there are no more than two connections between the origin and destination including any connections that are made while traveling to/from the stopover point. The stopover city must be located on a valid routing.
This is ridiculously limiting, especially if you do not live in a gateway city. Almost bad enough for me to say the stopover may as well be dead anyways. Say you live in Orlando any city in the US without nonstop service to London and want to take a stopover in London en route to Frankfurt. That’s actually an impossible routing now as it would require more than two connections along the way. And that’s far from being an obscure or circuitous trip.
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It’s sort of like they have a loyalty program because they feel they have to, but really don’t care. If I ever find a Delta seat, I’ll spend down my balance and be done with this one. That’s my one hope for the changes in 2015. The ability to book one ways will mean only needing to find that rare seat in one direction, and use a legitimate program (AA, UA, WN, AS, BA) in the other.
Hmmm can you fly MCO-LHR-AMS-FRA with a stopover in LHR? The MCO-LHR leg would be on Virgin Atlantic and the remaining legs will be on KLM. The 2 connections would be LHR and AMS.
Ahh…I forgot about the VS route. So pick any other city which doesn’t have non-stop service to LHR on SkyTeam, such as RDU, DFW, DEN or PHX. Or any of the scores of smaller cities DL serves.
At this point the benefit mostly exists in name only unless you live in a gateway city.
I understand your point overall. I just gave that example to ruffle your feathers. 😉
No worries…someone has to keep me honest. 🙂