Good news for Delta frequent flyers who have found themselves on CRJs for a couple of hours in coach:  the airline announced that it will add first class seats to all routes over 750 miles.   Practically speaking, there are about 50 routes that will gain seats (and upgrades for Medallion members), including a few doozies that have been flown in single-class CRJ-700s (LaGuardia – Omaha, I’m talking to you).

The full list of markets receiving upgrades is viewable here.

1) Delta has one unaccompanied minor traveling from Spokane to Boston via Minneapolis and another unaccompanied minor traveling from Spokane to Cleveland via Minneapolis.

2) The two children are on the same Spokane to Minneapolis flight.

3) Upon arrival for their connection in Minneapolis, paperwork is accidentally switched (like when Mike Brady is supposed to present architectural drawings at a meeting in Cincinnati but for reasons that aren’t important here opens up his plans only to find it switched with a poster of Yogi Bear).

4) Girl bound for Cleveland is placed on flight to Boston and vice versa.

5) Oops

6) In one of the odder quotes of the year, Delta’s spokesperson said they, “re-accommodated the children to their final destination cities at no cost” (nice to know they waived the change fee).

7) Kids return to their correct cities.

Delta Air Lines announced that it was eliminating the annoying close-in booking fees for award tickets, which tacked on as much as $150 for people booking award travel less than 3 days in advance.  This is a really customer-friendly move from an award program that has been less-than-stellar.

Less customer friendly is the increase in change fees on award tickets from $100 to $150.  Blah.

Also interestingly, they promise to improve their horrid award booking engine by the end of this year.  As someone who works in e-commerce, giving a completion date is never a good idea.  That said, if they can fix that it’ll go a long way toward actually being able to redeem Skymiles.

Delta Air Lines announced that it will launch 1-stop, once-weekly service from Atlanta to Monrovia, Liberia (via Accra) beginning in September.  Delta rolled out plans for the service several years ago as part of its ill-fated Cape Verde hub strategy (fascinating, but never launched).  The Liberia portion of that plan was quashed when the airline did not receive necessary approvals from the US and Liberian governments.

In case you were wondering, no Delta crew will spend an overnight in Monrovia which, while safer than before, is not exactly Cape Town.  Flights will depart within 3 hours of landing.

Delta now has plans to serve 10 African destinations from the US, which is impressive as just a few years ago no US airline served the continent.

Part of that Cape Verde hub strategy involved flights to Equitorial Guinea and Angola, flights that appeared to be permanently scrapped when Cape Verde went away.  But the end of the press release linked above suggests that the airline may, one day, serve those countries.

You may (or likely may not) remember about 16 months ago we shared the story of how Delta was launching Pittsburgh to Paris flights.  At the time we wondered how Delta could possibly make Pittsburgh – Paris work when at the same time Northwest, with its huge hub at Detroit, had canceled its Detroit – Paris flights.  The answer?  They took a great deal of money from the State of Pennsylvania and a Pittsburgh-area development agency (a “great deal of money” = $5 million).   The two groups guaranteed Delta that they would hit certain targets and, due to the economy and the utter ridiculousness of the flight, they will pay the carrier upwards of $5 million.

If you were wondering, Delta has run a 68% load factor, which isn’t terrible, but isn’t great.  The issue, really, has been with average fares, which were projected to be $582 each way, but only hit $413.  You can do the math on all that, but the short answer is that had the Allegheny Conference on Community Development and State of Pennsylvania listened to us, they wouldn’t be out $5 million.

Delta and Continental are raising bag fees to $25/$35 for first and second bags ($23/$32 if you buy the bag charge in advance online), though they are waiving fees for Elite members and full-fare ticket holders (and people flying to India, Israel, Brazil, Japan and China).

Airlines are, of course, free to do whatever they want, so bravo for them if they can get the money.  I just find it amusing that the second bag charge now costs more than the $29 JetBlue charges to fly a human in a seat from Fort Lauderdale to Nassau.

I was thinking about an old advertisement I saw from the early 1970s touting Delta’s then-new (and short-lived) 747 service.  Since I was a small child 747s have always been my favorite plane – their unusual shape, upstairs/downstairs configuration, and long-distance ability represented all that flight had to offer.  You could sit in this incredibly designed airplane and go anywhere in the world you wanted.  What more could a 10 year old need?

The young’uns out there likely have no recollection that 747s used to ply the domestic skies fairly regularly.  In the mid-1980s I flew Continental and People Express 747s from New York to Los Angeles.  Pan Am, Northwest and United were all flying 747s domestically at that time as well (American and Eastern also operated them for short periods.)

Using those aircraft on domestic flights today makes little-to-no economic sense.  It probably made little-to-no economic sense on many of the flights it served back then (Pan Am was flying 747s between New York and Miami for a bit).  But the most ridiculous were flown by Delta, which offered these 5 routes on 747s:

Dallas – Atlanta
Chicago – Miami
Detroit – Miami
Detroit – Altanta
Miami – Atlanta

Those were good times.  Detroit – Miami on a 747.  Har.

(Also funny is that ad I linked to suggesting that first class felt like being on a private jet – albeit a private jet with, uh, 400 seats).

Delta has been flying empty planes (so-called “Ghost Planes”) to Heathrow to be sprayed with anti-malaria disinfectant to meet Australian regulations for its flights to Sydney.  The Australian government requires planes to be sprayed with insecticide to fight malaria, but the US government does not permit the treatment on US soil.  The closest airport where it can be done is Heathrow, so Delta has been flying empty planes to the UK so they can be disinfected and sent back to Australia.

In Europe, this has caused a bit of an environmental uproar, as people complain about the environmental impact of flying an empty plane for 8,000 miles round trip.  Delta says it will be switching its disinfecting to a Chinese airport at the end of the month (why doesn’t that make me feel any better?)

Over the past two years, Delta has rolled out a significant international expansion, focusing on serving secondary markets from JFK and Atlanta.  There was lots of debate among airline types about whether this was:

a) A smart strategy, allowing them to jump into under-served markets (a la Continental); or

b) Doomed from the start, since if these markets were worth pursuing, someone would have pursued them already.  Plus, some were too far to allow for 757 service, forcing them to use the larger 767 which was difficult to fill profitably (ie, full of business passengers) on these routes.

It’s looking increasingly as if those who chose “B” were correct.  I’ve done a quick analysis (using the obsessively detailed Airline Route Updates) and here are the canceled routes from that much-ballyhooed international plan:

(Some are seasonal, some are permanent, some are called seasonal but are probably permanent)

Atlanta to:

Athens
Fortaleza
Guayaquil
Manaus
Moscow
Prague
Recife

JFK to:

Buenos Aires
Edinburgh
Kiev
Lyon
Manchester
Malaga
Pisa
Shannon
Valencia
Zurich

Add those to the previously announced list of African cities it will not be serving, and it would appear that, for the most part, the international experiment is over.  Yes, some of those European routes will resurface during the summer, but Delta is still trying to figure out the best long-term strategy.

Rather than jump on the bandwagon about Delta’s announced 4th tier in SkyMiles (called Diamond, earned when you hit 125,000 Elite miles.  You get lounge access, waved fees, upgrades on expensive coach fares, and unlimited upgrades on domestic frequent flyer tickets, and a handful of other things) and yammer about what I think (oh wait, yes I will:  except for the new “rollover” benefit where your elite miles over and above your current level roll over to the next year, there’s nothing particularly special)…I thought I’d give a quick roundup of what everyone else is saying (ranging from Happiest to Saddest):

Forrester:  This is the greatest move in history: “Keep ringing that bell, we have another winner here.”  Yes, Forrester is very happy with what Delta has rolled out and thinks it will help increase loyalty (As if someone with 100,000 miles wasn’t loyal already).  No mention of how Platinums used to get many of these perks.  Or that AA and United actually have better programs.

Cranky: Cranky is also pretty happy with what he sees: “it’s another day of good news for frequent flier mileage junkies…nice work,” which is both true (better than not offering a 4th tier) and not true (when has taking things away and re-instating them become the new benefit?).  Gary Leff from View from the Wing does a number on him in the comments section.  In a nice way, of course.

One Mile at a Time: Lucky is pretty ho-hum, noting that UA and AA flyers get many of these benefits already and some additional, including systemwide upgrades:  “This is a non-event…Diamond is probably better than US Airways Chairman, although that has more to do with the product as such instead of the actual benefits…”

View from the Wing: Not happy at all and thinks the whole thing is overblown, like Charles Barkley on a Phoenix street corner (OK, I wrote that, not him).  “Delta miles are also worth less than those of most competing carriers…Delta just isn’t that rewarding, of course, and likely never will be.”

Flyertalk Delta Forum: If you want bitching, this is your place.  Most disappointment around lack of systemwide upgrades.  People do like rollover, though.  “Diamond tier is just not as competitive with the current marketplace as the other tiers…”

There you have it…Rollover is good; lack of systemwide upgrades on all fares is bad; and everything else doesn’t matter much.