Sidebar--TC, I'm looking at a South Africa trip in Oct/Nov 2013. With what company are you travelling by land?

Sorry to hijack, but I'm just curious. I hope someone can help with your question.

I'm booking directly with Wilderness Safari into 5 of their camps in Botswana, P_M.

Do you really need to lock in your land arrangements this far out?

Yes, Jeff.

I wanted to travel the same route this year in October, and started looking last year at 331 days out. The high mileage requirement never dropped. I chose to go to Brazil instead. I also chose to return to United's Mileage Plus program. Hope you have better luck with Delta.

Femi...oddly there were low mileage seats on this route in late October/November/December this year. I have no idea when they actually first appeared. Its such a game. Worse than gambling in Las Vegas as far as odds stacked against the player.

Perhaps Delta waits till it's nearer the day of departure to lower the mileage requirements.

I prefer Delta's ATL-JNB routing, seat style and availability of dates over United's. When it was time for me to book next year's trip using United miles, the redemption requirements were exactly as posted in the guidelines(although I had to be much more flexible with dates).

Delta's website is terrible for searching FF flights and don't show all availability. Join Air France Flying Blue program and search for your Delta FF flights there. If you find what you want, call Delta and book (if you can't create it on their website).

You might read some of the more recent posts on the Delta forum at Flyertalk.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta-skymiles/1029634-definitive-how-search-low-tier-business-awards.html

A major peeve of mine. I have not been able to find a "miles" trip on Delta in several years. Their actual available awards never match their so called award charts that I have found. I am wanting to ditch Delta and move on to United (much more fair) due to this. Anyone want to trade United miles for my Delta miles

Right on, hpeabody ! For Delta FF miles are monies owed. They want us to use more miles for trips as that reduces their debt. We signed on for a trip last fall that used many more miles than that on the award chart just so we could get out of the program. Unhappily we had to cancel the trip and put the miles back into our account. Now looking for trips to do this. We have a lot of miles. Don't know anything about United's program but think American's is much better than Delta's, or, at least, that's been our experience.

We've gone over to United as well, but meanwhile -- had to cancel a Delta all-miles trip this past month for family reasons -- now checking on early next year and they want 200k miles per person each way! Ugh!! I have 324k in the bank (redeposited--with a fee--when I cancelled the trip), but now I can't find anything remotely like the flights I had secured for this past month.

I just cancelled my Amex Skymiles card, also, becaue the Delta program has gotten ridiculous, you just can't use your miles sometimes on partner flights, and other flights have really steep requirements compared to just a year ago or so. But the fact is, there is no logic you can plan on, it is solely demand, I think, their "cheapest" flights by miles are the ones that are not very popular or ones with long layovers, things like that. It isn't related to season totally, but you should be able to find something for less miles during January to some place in Europe than summer, that is true.

I have 100K miles and last year I could get a business class seat nonstop RT to Europe on Air France with them. Now, you cannot hardly ever book AF or KLM miles (and that is one reason I got the card, for Europe), they only allocate a very few seats to Delta FFs. I checked and sometimes you couldn't even get an AF flight as far ahead as they opened the booking.

I have never heard of them only putting in high award seats and that the closer you get the time, the better seats you can get. That doesn't really make sense to me, as the cheapest seats (ie best) would go first. Maybe there is something to it as you said, they wait to see if the flight will book or not, but I wouldn't count on that at all any more -- getting some good deal later on. ALl the flights are really really expensive now (in terms of miles). Last year I could get the business class RT to Paris nonstop for about 90K miles, I think, and this year I can only get one with connections on Delta, in economy, for about 130K miles as the best deal.

BTW, you can't join AF's program to see more flights any more.

I completely agree with you, Christina -- Delta has to be the worst FF program out there in terms of redeeming miles.

If you still want to try to use your miles on AF, though (and it does take work) here's a trick you may not have tried: try searching segment-by-segment on delta.com's advanced search, or multicity page, using the "by schedule" button rather than "by price".

If you try IAD to CDG, for example, you'll be able to see any AF flights. Try any of the other cities AF flies too, also, but segment by segment rather than just roundtrips such as IAD to JFK and JFK to CDG. You generally can't find AF flights by using that calendar feature or by searching by price.

Maye you've tried all of this already, but I thought I'd mention the method I tend to use, in case it can help you at all. Best of luck; with Delta, you need it!

I've been working on these flights for months now. Here's another little "quirk" in the Delta system.

The awards charts states that a ticket costs a certain number of miles from "North America" to "South Africa" -- in my case MSP to JNB. When I look at the Awards Calendar I can find "low priced" tickets from ATL to JNB on certain dates. However, when I put in MSP to JNB the number of miles required jumps significantly. The only routing is MSP/ATL/JNB, so one has to go through ATL. There are no "low priced" tickets between MSP and ATL, so there are no low priced tickets from MSP to JNB. It won't even let me book Economy seats from MSP to ATL and then BUS seats on the long haul. I can pick (by schedule) Econ to ATL, Bus to JNB and the same on the return. But as soon as I finalize the flighs the econ flights automatically become FC seats and the price jumps in miles.

The only way around this is to book two seperate tickets -- low price MSP-ATL and another low price ATL-JNB....but of course that costs me an extra 25,000 miles over the person who originates in the North American city of Atlanta.

Since when is Atlanta part of North America, but Minneapolis is NOT? If you live in a Delta hub (ATL) you have a significant advantage over Frequent Fliers who live in other N. American cities. How is that fair? In fact, I'm surprised that some enterprising young lawyer hasn't started up a class action law suit to make this point.

TC, I feel your pain, but the situation is a bit different for those wishing to fly from ATL to any European city nonstop. I'm close enough to ATL to drive, but I'd rather fly out of my local airport, and with miles, it's sometimes cheaper to do so.

The amount of miles needed is always greater on those ATL nonstops. If you book a ticket from ATL through Detroit or New York, the amount of miles is generally lower. Grrrrr. Why can't Delta make the whole process simpler?!

As to your own situation, is it possible to fly MSP-AMS-JNB or MSP-CDG-JNB? (I'm sure you've tried it all, too....)Good luck with your trip. I'm researching like mad now, to be able to jump on anything available for summer 2014.

thanks for the tips, I have tried searching IAD to CDG, and don't search by price or the calendar, already. They just don't offer flights on their partners any more. I think I found one seat in the middle of next January or something, on AF, but that was just a search out of curiosity, I didn't want to go in January.

I think Delta is really only good if you live near Atlanta now. Because even for the flights I could get to CDG or BCN or wherever I was interested in Europe, they would only offer me poor connections through Atlanta, which really steamed me. I actually wanted to go to BCN and they have a nonstop from ATL to BCN, so I figured that's okay as I couldn't get a nonstop from home anyway. However, even though they had multiple choices of connections available which I could buy (IAD-ATL-BCN), by FF miles, only one was available and it was a connection that allowed only 1 hour transfer time. Several of my friend told me I would never make that given it involved transferring terminals. The connection I wanted that allowed 2-3 hrs was not available to me with FF miles.

I also was not allowed to book seats on their partner KLM to AMS from IAD.

I've just decided to quit the program, the only good thing is your miles don't expire, so I'm going to have to try to use all the ones I got (and it took me forever) for some domestic flight. Even there, the miles required has gone really up. I originally joined this program because I wanted to get flights to Europe on their partners.

>>>The only way around this is to book two seperate tickets -- low price MSP-ATL and another low price ATL-JNB.<<<<

Part of Delta's search problems. Married segments, etc. and pricing out as if you added a flight. If you can find r/t low mileage for MSP/ATL that will work and r/t ATL/JNB, then the flight is probably there and you could call Delta to book (fee for that unless you have certain status).

Have you looked at the flight maps to see which Delta/Skyteam members have flights from US and which cities?

For the record I've had great success in getting award seats on Delta in business class. Three weeks ago I snatched a USA-SYD, DRW-SYD, SYD-USA ticket for October. And two days ago I nabbed a pair of USA-SCL RTs for February. ALL at the lowest mile price, and within 2 days of the preferred dates.

Bottom line is with Delta you can never tell when low award seats will open up.

noflyzone gives me hope. As mentioned I hope to reschedule a cancelled March trip for next March.

One tip from the Flyertalk skymiles discussion really helped me search for lower miles -- the suggestion was not to select business from the opening search, but economy. Then choices for economy or business open up for the various flight options.

Whereas I was getting 200,000 miles per segment per person when I selected business from the opening drop down menu, I was getting 100,000 per segment/ticket with this latter method.

Maybe people are already searching that way but it was news to me.

Thanks all. I will continue to work on this. We do have flights. I had to book something in order to nail down the land portion of the trip. We are currently holding: Econ class MSP/CDG on AF, bus class CDG/JNB on AF for 195,000 miles. I would prefer to have the ATL/JNB routing because that plane has lay flat seating in bus class. Sleeping to JNB would be wonderful.

If I have to...I will purchase tickets MSP/ATL and then use my miles for the business routing to JNB. I just don't think its fair to say that a certain mileage is based on flying from a "North American City"...when it really isn't all No. Am. cities -- only ATL.

Only a couple more years of intensive travel and then I will be finished with Delta and all other award programs. The games are just too much to bother.

I managed to get to Kenya twice in business using SkyMiles. My last visit was June 2012 and I was able to tack on a 5-night stopover in Paris. Both trips I circumvented the delta.com nightmare by flying AF and/or KLM, which at that time were always low-level awards.

I've read that this is no longer a viable workaround. Does anyone know if that's the case today?

AF has reduced their number of award seats in general. On top of that, they've created a new category of "classic" awards only available to Flying Blue members so checking the AF website is no longer a reliable indicator of availability if using Skymiles. You can check availability on expertflyer.com. I've been checking the LAX-CDG route and most of the availability is in winter.

Thanks, Patty.