mgnapoli

I know this will not solve my problem, but I really want to vent, and perhaps provide info so that others can avoid this problem. I have about 50,000 Delta Skymiles, and wanted to use them to rent a car in England. When I entered all the information in the Delta system, it calculated miles required (I had more than enough), but then it would not process the transaction. I called Delta, they told me to contact the rental agency (Alamo), Turns out you can't use Skymiles for international car rentals. Of course this is not stated on the Delta website. Be forewarned.

Hez

We never use miles for car rentals as the conversion is never as good as for flights - but we have United points mostly. 50K is enough for a 2 domestic round trip tickets, and almost enough for a round trip to Europe. We've used 100K points each for business class this summer which would have cost around $7000, making 50K points worth $3500.

Also FF miles are often very good for upgrading flights - for 25K (15K if you purchased a full fare economy) you can upgrade to business class from the US to England.

Just a thought as maybe there's a bright side and you can get more value for those points elsewhere.

mgnapoli

We will use the points for trips at some point, but we are flying United to England because of a more favorable schedule. I sort of had the car rental using points figured into our budget, and it just ticks me off. Sorry for venting.

janisj

Not quite sure what the 'vent' is about. Or the 'warning' for that matter.. None of my ff plans are good for overseas car rentals. Maybe some are - but I've never heard of one.

mgnapoli

And where exactly is that stated in the airline info?

Christina

I don't think Delta has a good FF program in terms of using the miles for flights, they cost too much and you can't hardly get any on their international partners any more, except maybe in the middle of January (I"ve tried, that was the only time available).

However, I don't see anything in the Skymiles program that ever says you CAN do this, so I don't know why you would assume you could. In fact, I couldn't find anything on the Delta Skymiles website that ever says you can use miles to rent a car anywhere, so that's news to me. Where do you even see that you can do that? Because I might be interested in that.

I know you earn miles from their car rental partners, but I've never seen in the Skymiles literature that you can use them to rent a car. And I just tried for an example to book a rental on their website, and it came back with options that were all prices, nothing about miles. And if you go into the section about using your miles for award travel, it only gives you flights (or you can buy magazines), nothing I see about cars.

mgnapoli

The car rental option is as follows:

https://travelmarketplace.delta.com/travel/arc.cfm

Hez

Wow - just did a quick search on there as I was curious how many points it would cost - 14K per day for a ford focus rental in Boston. Same car would cost $77/day (Boston is crazy expensive for cars!) - so that makes those points worth .0055 - for comparison in my earlier example our points were worth .07 - nearly 13x more! I guess glad we have United points not Delta!

mgnapoli

Not a great conversion, but I wanted to use the miles up before we lost them (which happens more often than I'd like to think). Did you see anything that states that international rentals are not permitted?

mgnapoli

Or do you always have to have the last word?

Patty

<i>I wanted to use the miles up before we lost them</i>

Delta Skymiles don't expire.

mgnapoli

I have belonged to other programs that had miles that were not supposed to expire, and then suddenly they made a change to the program and the miles were gone - airlines are not very reliable entities..

janisj

>>Or do you always have to have the last word?<<.

Christina

thanks for the link, the confusing is that it isn't obvious that you would use the "marketplace" for buying things to book a car rental, it isn't labeled very well.

I think the website is goofy if it gives you miles and then you can't book it. But it's the same way with their FF flights, actually, Delta is just a really bad FF program. When I was searchign for flights, I'd get options I wanted, with the miles they needed, but when I tried to book them, it said they weren't available. By calling them, they told me those flights were NEVER available because they were KLM, so why do they have you waste all your time on their website getting miles qutoes for things that are not available? What kind of a dumb computer algorithm is that.

This is why I dropped my Amex Delta Skymiles card because the program has gotten so bad.

Hez

Were you talking to me about having the last word? (not trying to heaer

mgnapoli

Not you, Hez..