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Thinking about booking the new Delta One Suite on the airline’s inaugural Airbus A350 flight in October? So are we at TPG! I hope you’ve been saving up…
Currently, Delta is charging a whopping $13,005 for a one-way ticket from Detroit to Tokyo on the October 30 inaugural.
Or you can book the flight for just 240,000 SkyMiles — while that’s an awfully high sum, given the cash fare you’d actually be getting a redemption value of 5.4 cents per mile here.
Delta’s new Suite product offers a sliding door at every business-class seat — the fact that the airline’s launching both a new Delta One seat and a brand-new aircraft with a single inaugural may be driving up the price here.
The new Suite looks pretty spiffy, sure, but it’s quite compact. You should have more room in Qatar’s Qsuite, for example, and even JetBlue’s Mint suite (available in every other row on select domestic routes) looks a bit more spacious. In other words: Etihad’s Residence this is not.
That said, there’s certainly tremendous excitement surrounding this launch — especially among Delta loyalists.
And there are some options for getting the fare down. For example, if you book a round-trip ticket with the return in coach, you’ll pay $10,285:
Meanwhile, a Delta One outbound, Premium Select (premium economy) return will run you $10,588:
And even a Delta One round-trip is a hair cheaper than a one-way, and if you’re flying from the US to Tokyo, you’ll probably need a flight back at some point, too. (And you’ll get two Tumi amenity kits. Ha!)
Bottom Line
There’s no question that Delta’s inaugural pricing is obscene, especially given that there are currently 9+ seats available to book. To make matters worse, only center seats are available to select at this point, but it’s possible that a few window seats are being blocked until check-in.
Ultimately, a “normal” fare on this route will run you $6,300, so if you don’t need to be on the inaugural, you’ll save quite a bit by waiting. Award flights are consistently priced at 200,000 miles each way through the end of the schedule in 2018 — at 400,000 round-trip, SkyMiles aren’t a great option on this route, and unfortunately these higher-level awards aren’t available through partner programs, either.
Source: thepointsguy.com