Travel&Vacation

Ed Perkins on Travel

Add Continental and Delta to the list of airlines that make it easy to find out how hard it is to find frequent flyer seats. A few weeks ago, I praised American’s new flexible search website, and I’m happy to report that Continental and Delta offer similar capabilities. Sadly, however, improved search capability doesn’t increase the number of available seats; it merely makes it clearer, more quickly, how scarce those seats really are.

Continental’s system is most similar to American’s. Enter the usual itinerary details, indicate you have flexible dates, and the site shows you a conventional calendar display for two months—the one that includes the date you specified in the itinerary plus the following month. Individual dates are color-coded to indicate which awards (low-mileage “standard” or high-mileage “easy pass” seats) might be available. Click on the dates that show the availability you want, and you get a choice of available itineraries. You can move forward, month by month, if you don’t find what you want initially.

Delta’s display is a bit different, but functionally similar. Enter your itinerary, target dates, and the class of service you want. The display shows a full month, indicating the dates on which either low-mileage “Sky Saver” or high-mileage “Sky Choice” seats (or both) are available. You can move forward or backward, month-by-month, to search for the seats you want.

The two systems share many common features, but there are differences:

• For connecting flights on either line, when you specify that you want a seat in business or first class, the display may return itineraries where one or more of the legs is in coach. As far as I can tell, you can’t specify that you want the systems to show premium-class options only.
• On Continental, you can search for seats without logging in as a OnePass member. On Delta, however, although you can get yes/no answers to flights on specific dates without logging on, you must enter your frequent flyer number and PIN to use the new flexible-date system.
• Neither line makes it easy to check seat availability to/from alternative airports at either end of your trip. You have to start the entire process over each time.

In my brief check, Continental’s site did a better job than Delta’s of presenting acceptable itineraries. On several trips, Delta required layovers at JFK or Atlanta of 10 hours or more, and several of my tests from the West Coast to Europe returned itineraries with a red-eye from the West Coast to JFK, an all-day wait in JFK, and another red-eye to Europe. Feh.

Overall, all three systems I’ve seen recently—American, Continental, and Delta—made it much easier to locate what few frequent flyer seats are available at the low-mileage levels.

Just how tough is it to get seats? On Continental, I found some reasonably attractive options from the West Coast to Europe, for either a last-minute trip or a trip in late fall. But on Delta, I couldn’t work out an acceptable low-mileage business class round-trip from either Portland or San Francisco to any of several European cities, for the remainder of the year, including some destinations that I thought would be less in demand.