If you have been following the world of miles & points for a while, you probably know that Delta Skymiles do not get much love among frequent flyers or miles/points collectors. It even got the nickname SkyPeso because Delta kept increasing award prices and devaluing the program. In fact, Delta is the only airline that doesn’t publish an award chart.  Just this Friday, OMAAT pointed out that Delta silently increased the miles required on partner awards. The news was also covered by the Points Guy. There is simply no love out there for Delta Skymiles.
While I don’t disagree that every devaluation stinks, I also happen to find great value in Delta Skymiles. Here at PWaC we are all about family travel. If family travel is also what you are interested in, then you should take a deep look at Delta Skymiles before you write it off. There really is a lot Delta Skymiles can do for your family.
The latest change applies mostly to business class on partner flights. Yes it sure is nice to fly business class to Europe or Asia or any other part of the world that Delta and its partners can take you. But in reality, for families with kids, whether it is three kids like my family or six kids like Dan’s family, most of time we will fly in coach.  In the end we will all survive the flight and still have a great trip, perhaps at no cost at all. Award travel in coach using Delta Skymiles is where you get the most value for your family.
To me, Skymiles are simply awesome for travel within continental U.S. and Canada, because Delta releases more coach awards seats than American or United. Let’s say I want to take my family of five to Toronto from San Francisco in June. Delta has plenty dates available at the saver-level of 12,500 miles per person one-way.
Here’s what American Airline’s availability looks like. Not one saver award seat available in the entire month of June! In fact, this is the norm now with American. Its award availability is just crappy! I have a stash of American miles and I use them mostly for flights to Asia on Japan Airlines and Cathay Pacific.
United’s availability are better than American’s thanks to its partner Air Canada. Here are dates for five people using United miles. Choice of dates are not as wide open as Delta’s, but if you want to fly business class, you do have a few dates to choose from, which you most likely won’t find on Delta.
Dan recently took his family of eight from Cincinnati to California, for free using Delta Skymiles. Want to find 8 seats on United or AA? You can forget about it! But with Delta, you will have better luck. In fact, back in January I wrote about up to 9 Delta awards to Asia or to Hawaii this summer.
What if you want to take the family to Asia or Europe? The latest Skymiles change does affect coach awards on partners, but only minimal. For example, my sister-in-law just flew Korean Airline from Seoul to  New York JFK using 35,000 Delta Skymiles. The same flight now cost 40,000 miles. But on the other hand, coach award on Delta’s own flights dropped by 5,000 miles. I can take my family of five from San Francisco to Barcelona in July for just 30,000 miles per person each way, and I have lots of dates to choose from!
Delta Skymiles are easy to collect. American Express has a total of 6 different Delta cards (3 personal and 3 business), each offering a good amount of miles as sign-up bonus. Delta is also a 1:1 transfer partner with Amex Membership Rewards, which are super easy to accumulate. Of course, it is better to accumulate Amex Membership Rewards directly instead of Delta Skymiles due to its flexibility. But it would be a big mistake of letting any Skymiles pass by.
I always maintain a good amount of Delta Skymiles, which I used only for domestic trips during the past few years.  I spent a good chunk of Skymiles taking my daughter visiting colleges last summer. So far this year I already booked three trips to her college for the coming months. I am sure Skymiles will come in handy the next four years while she is away in college.
(PWaC: The last 3 times we’ve flown as a family, we’ve used Skymiles every time – American and United availability is awful!)
To sum it up, don’t write off Delta Skymiles. if you have a family, big or small, take a good look at Delta Skymiles. How about you? Are you finding value in Delta Skymiles for your family?Â
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
Nice to see you trash AA awards like they deserve. AA award availability is trAAsh. So AAngry that I have so many AA miles and they are virtually useless.
I AAprove of you AAdding the double AA to every A-word 🙂
Delta has an insanely bad frequent flier program, but you’ve just hit on the one good thing about it. Good of you to see the glass as half full.
On a separate note, it’s rather unpleasant to have to unclick the newsletter box every time I leave a comment. It would be much more ethical to default to the box being unchecked.
I agree. I still fly Delta and there are gems in certain routes (I’ve seen 10k skymiles sales for roundtrip domestic flights in economy).
They are definitely underrated, and are the only American carrier with good availability everywhere. OMAAT doesn’t fly much domestic coach! They also have some great sales for 5k each way; I got 4 seats YUL-PBI-YUL for 10k roundtrip when they were selling for over $400.
Yeah the monthly Skymiles flash sale are a great deal. Some deals are more like year-round, such as SJC-SEA, SJC-LAS for 5k!
These 5K mile flights usually would cost $59. Terrible use of miles
Not always. Often times SJC to LAS are over $100! It really depends on the date.
Yep! Domestic is where it’s at (and where it’s going to be going forward) the days of outsized rewards for international travel in premium are fading fast if not all together gone, until perhaps the next recession.
Delta has no award chart and raised their fares again and you say that they are a good deal? How much exactly did Delta pay you? You used only one example where Lucky used multiple examples.
Skypesos sucks! I canceled my DL credit card last month and added the AA citi card. At least AA has an award chart
Sharon shared a few examples and I also added my examples from my last 3 trips – for EACH of those 3 trips, American and United have had almost ZERO availability for where I wanted to go and Delta had MULTIPLE flights (Sometimes multiple on the SAME date!) with 8 seats of Saver availability
Having an award chart but no award seats available gets you nowhere. And needing only 1-2 tickets is a completely different story than needing 5, or maybe even 8 tickets! Delta pays me nothing. I am simply saying if I want to fly the family somewhere and use miles, Skymiles will do that while AA and UA miles won’t. And by the way, Delta raised the price for business class, but they didn’t really raise the price for coach, where most family sit.
These are all a joke! To get these miles means spending money. Some people, even myself at one point spend a few extra days flying or spending just to get the extra perks. You have to ask is it really worth it??
Not to me anymore!! Why spend money to a program that won’t give back an equal or more value on your investment. If you can crunch the numbers in your favor go right ahead. Better off just sticking to one airline that way you get the most bang for your buck.
Mileage running and mattress running to chase status with airlines or hotels are never worth the time nor money to me. With a big family, we have to be smart of how to use the miles we get from credit card signups. Why would anyone want to spend 25K miles one-way in coach on AA or United when you can fly Delta for 12,500 miles?
We also find that AA and UA availability awards are basically non-existent for the past 2 years. Unlike most of your comments, we fly business for the most part. We used to fly AA all the time JFK-SFO round trip 6-8 times a year. So now we fly the airline with the lowest business fares & have no loyalty to any of them as their loyalty programs are basically worthless!
The only airline I am really loyal to is Alaska. But unfortunately they don’t take me to all places I need to be. Now that they are flying EWR-SJC, I found myself taking that route instead of JFK-SFO on AA or Delta.
I was going to mention Alaska/Virgin, but clearly it all depends upon a) where you live, and b) where you want to go.
Living in the SF Bay Area, Virgin America has been a no-brainer for the last nine years for (approx.) 95+% of my domestic travel needs for the past nine years. For example, 2016 I flew:
— BA 2x
— B6 2x
— HA 4x¹
— UA 2x
— VS 2x
— and VX 30x
_______________
¹ In hindsight, it would have been much better had I flown HA *only* 2x (inter-island), and taken VX or AS from California to Hawai’i.
I am in the bay area too. Alaska has been s my go-to airline for trips to Hawaii and Mexico. VX would be fine except their schedule to Hawaii aren’t as good as AS. Now that the two combined, I can’t wait to see them adding more flights across the country. But still, if I want to go to Canada or the Caribbean, Alaska cannot take me but Delta will.
I’m not a family but I do very good with SkyMiles as an individual. While I agree that Delta has very much devalued the program, I think the ones getting the most upset are the ones who fly business class.
I only fly coach. I’d never pay for business/first and to me it doesn’t make sense to redeem miles for those. My last two flights I used up a total of 44k miles, and the cash value combined at the time of booking would have been over $800!
SkyMiles is still very much a useful program if you are flexible with your dates and make sure to get good value for your miles.
Delta offers 5,000 mile flights from Seattle to Orange County (Disneyland). It’s one of my favorite redemptions.
Incredibly useful post. Will be getting on the Delta skymiles bandwagon pronto thanks to your info.
Thanks!
Carl Kruse
I saw your story on Sunday Morning. I have been doing the credit cards miles offers on and off for the past few years, but I am an amateur compared to you. I have a question, how long should one keep a cards after you have earned the awards promo offers. I had been holding on to them till just before the annual fee kicks in fearing it might affect my credit if I cancel the card soon after I get the awards. I do have an AA Citi card that is my mainstay card that I have had since the 1990s; but the others I just use for the miles promos. Any advice would be awesome. Thanks, Rebecca
Rebecca, that seems like a fairly reasonable strategy