Sunday, March 26, 2017

Thank you Delta... See you next time Iceland...

As I'm typing this, we would have been in Iceland and probably enjoying the Northern Lights. But instead, I'm typing this from my hotel room in Atlanta, getting ready for my 3rd work week here, and continue to run my busy season marathon that started since January. Since I have no vacation to blog about for awhile, I shall blog about this planned 'vacation' that ended up being cancelled. Here's a chronological recap of what happened:

Thanks to the Delta Amex sign-up bonus and some work travels over the last 2 years, I accumulated a good bit of Delta Skymiles. And when my Skymiles balance hit 6 digits, I can't help but to start looking for good options to use my miles to travel somewhere. Iceland has been on our bucket list and when I found flights for 60K Delta miles + $51.46 taxes per person for a round trip from Nashville to Iceland, I went ahead and booked the flights for March 2017 (still in time for Northern Lights). Considering that Delta's miles aren't the best/easiest to use, 60K to Iceland is actually quite decent.


Right after completing the booking, I realized mistake #1 that I made. I accidentally used the corporate credit card that was stored on Delta's website, instead of my personal Delta Amex. I was 100% sure that I typed in my personal CC's expiry date and CVV number, but somehow the transaction still went through even though the card number didn't match. =.= Lesson learnt, don't store any cc details online! Mistake #2, I could have just cancelled the booking without any fees within 24 hours and rebook the same tickets using the correct cc, but instead, I called Delta asking if they could change the cc details and they said I have to call the Amex to do it. I called Amex to explain the situation, and it took about 4 months and several phone calls before the charges finally got switched to my personal cc. And this brings me to mistake #3, I could have gotten a $50 credit for using my Delta Amex for eligible Delta purchases within 3 months, but since it wrongly charged my corporate card, I didn't get the credit. =(


Mistake #4 happened 1 week after I booked the flights. Delta had a Europe award deal that brought the miles required for the same flight down to only 49K per person. Seriously?!?! The difference of 22K miles is equal to a roundtrip domestic ticket!! =.=


So I decided to call Delta and ask if they could do anything to help. I explained my situation and was lucky to have a super helpful rep that helped redeposit the miles difference!!

After finally sorting out the flight situation, we started planning for the trip. Our plan was to rent a campervan and drive around the entire island in 5 days. I even mapped out our routes and made an itinerary for the entire trip. But fortunately, we hadn't made any reservation for the campervan or accommodations.


Then 2017 came, Delta made some changes to the timing to our departing flight and hubby switched job, so we had to cancel this trip. I called Delta and was assisted by yet another helpful rep, and was able to cancel our flights without any fees (would have costed $150/pax to redeposit the miles). 

Looking back at all the mistakes/changes I had to make while booking our flights, this trip was probably not meant to happen anyway. Even though this trip didn't work out, I should give full credit to Delta's customer reps for being absolutely awesome!! Hope that I'll get to use these miles for another trip with Delta in the near future. =)

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