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Delta Rolls Back Virgin Atlantic Surcharges — But For How Long?

Julian Mark Kheel
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Julian Mark Kheel is TPG's Director and Senior Industry Analyst of points & miles and the credit card industry.
May 29, 2017
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2 min read
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Delta Rolls Back Virgin Atlantic Surcharges — But For How Long?
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On Sunday we reported that Delta SkyMiles had begun charging carrier surcharges for Upper Class redemptions on its partner Virgin Atlantic. While the program has always charged the extra fees for customers originating in Europe, this was the first time we saw huge surcharges for those starting out in the US.

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On Sunday Delta SkyMiles was adding over $1,200 in surcharges to this Virgin Atlantic award redemption. Flights on its own metal only had $270 in fees.

By adding the fee, the cost of an award ticket on Virgin Atlantic Upper Class shot up to over $1,200 along with the previously inflated partner redemption price of 170,000 SkyMiles. Compare that to the same route in Delta One business class, which runs only $270 plus 140,000 miles.

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But here's how the identical Virgin Atlantic flights are pricing today.

As of this Monday morning, though, it appears the website has now rolled back the change. The same Virgin Atlantic flights that included the surcharge yesterday are now pricing identically to the Delta flights, save the 30,000 difference in miles.

What's going on here? It's not clear. The original change may have been an IT bug, or this new revision might be the bug. Or it's possible Delta had planned to make this change and accidentally rolled it out earlier than planned, then rolled it back. Or maybe Delta felt the customer outrage and thought the better of the change. (Alright, that last one is highly unlikely, but it's always a possibility.)

We've reached out to our contacts at Delta for clarification and we'll update this post as soon as we get more information. In the meantime, if you wanted to book a Virgin Atlantic Upper Class flight using Delta SkyMiles, we strongly suggest you do it quickly just in case this is a temporary glitch.

H/T: Rene's Points