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Delta’s Errant Currency Conversion – For Our Good

When you cancel a ticket with Delta, if it is not a refundable fare, they refund you the amount of the ticket minus the cost of the change. For domestic tickets, it is $200 while international tickets start at $300. Not a pleasant thing to deal with, but better than losing all of the value of the ticket!

Background

Well, that happened to me last year with a ticket. I had to cancel a ticket that began from a foreign airport and I had forgotten (in my haste), that foreign-originating flights do not qualify for Delta’s Risk-Free Cancellation policy. So, I had this unused ticket sitting in my account.

The time came for me to use the ticket for some travel. Because I was looking for a ticket originating in Europe, the pricing from Delta came out in Euros (it displays the price in the currency of the originating airport but offers a currency calculator at the end to see the current rate they are using). I found the flight I wanted and then went to my account to grab the certificate and start over.

Errant Currency Conversion (or lack thereof)

The errant currency conversion part came in the end when I went to the summary page. The price that was quoted to me was in euros, but so was the certificate. That might be expected, but the problem was that it was not converted to euros from dollars. In other words, the the number value of the amount stayed the same even though it should have been reduced to match the euro=usd conversion rate!

That meant that the value of the certificate would end up being worth about 35% more than if the itinerary I had searched for had been in dollars! Obviously this is a technical error of some sort but I am curious if others have had this experience. For once, Delta’s poor IT works in our favor!

Have you found this to be true in your case? I am curious if it works with other forms of payment as well, like gift certificates. What about other currencies?

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About the author

Charlie

Charlie has been an avid traveler and runner for many years. He has run in marathons around the world for less than it would cost to travel to the next town - all as a result of collecting and using miles and points. Over the years, he has flown hundreds of thousands of miles and collected millions of miles and points.
Now he uses this experience and knowledge to help others through Running with Miles.

2 Comments

  • Looked over this a few times and still don’t get it or what you are saying. So you canceled. Delta gave you a ETV and converted from EURO to DOLLARS for the cert. Now you are booking a new flight, starting from Europe? That is pricing in EURO and the cert you are now using is making the DOLLARS show up as EURO at checkout?
    .
    On a side note, you can often push Delta to give you FULL credit for a cancel as and ETV. It may take a few HUCB that is hang up call back to get it done but you can get it done most times.

    • I actually did have the full credit on the cert (it was a long story I decided to leave out due to relevancy). The ETV was in dollars (let’s say $500) and I went to apply it to a ticket originating in Europe (let’s say 600 euros). Instead of the cert converting to the accurate amount (of 367 euros), it instead directly converted to the same amount in euros (500 euros). That made the certificate actually worth $675 – or $175 more than the certificate was issued for. Make sense? I am not sure what you were saying…