Last night, I wrote a very brief blog post entitled, “Delta – I’ve Missed You.” In that post, I mentioned some of the things I enjoy about flying Delta like friendly employees, clean airplanes, consistency in service, and most of all, wi-fi. I apparently struck a positive nerve because I’ve had several comments to the post and the number of views of the post numbers into the several hundreds. I really like Delta Air Lines, but clearly, a number of people out there are either wondering what I’m smoking or share similar feelings.

As I mentioned in my post, SkyMiles can be a challenge. It’s not that the program is totally unusable, it’s just frustrating sometimes. I’m absolutely convinced that Delta’s website simply doesn’t “see” award availability that really is there, and when it does….something usually goes wrong to give you some kind of error when you try to book it. This has been covered at length by bloggers far more eloquent than me in explaining it so I won’t belabor the point. That said, it’s something that should be fixed. Given that my Google Analytics data clearly points out that there is interest in the topic, I thought it might be interesting to list the top 3 things I think Delta could do to improve SkyMiles, only one of which is even tacitly related to their well publicized “availability” issues. So here ya’ go.

  1. Fix the Delta.com booking engine
  2. Offer one-way awards
  3. Make at least a token portion of their systemwide upgrades from Platinum and Diamond Medallions usable on any fare

So those are my 3 ideas for SkyMiles. See, I’m really not all that demanding, am I? What are your ideas?