Have 120,000 sky miles want to take wife to Venice

First post hope I can get some help to take wife on a special vacation o Venice, Italy. I really want her to see the great party that Venetians throw for Feste de Redentore during the third weekend in July. I have Amex Gold Sky Miles card. Can anyone help with ways to build miles, buy miles, pay with miles,or whatever creative ways at can get us from Buffalo to Venice in business class.
Thanks

I'm only nominally a Delta FF member, but I have flown KLM (a SkyTeam airline) to Venice two months ago. As you're not likely to get a non-stop, I'd recommend KLM through Amsterdam.

Looks like you're probably going to hit high season, which would probably be 62.5k miles each way per person, so it looks like you've got half the miles you need.

Pay With Miles may also work to your advantage.

Where did the 62.5K miles each way per person come from? Low miles TATL RT in BE is 100K miles. DL does not offer one way award tickets, except at the price in miles of a RT, nor do they publish seasonal prices in miles for award tickets.

Most people are well advised to absolutely avoid pay with miles!

From this page:

July is not low miles for Venice, though, and the chart showed 50k each way low biz.

Welcome to Milepoint kerr241.

With 200,000 Skymiles, so you need 80k more somehow you can take the wife to Vince in July. AF has decent award availability for July. Here is just a sample for July I did.



Delta partner awards always price out at low levels. So you may want to start doing some spending on that AMEX, do some mileage runs, or upgrade your card beyond Gold to Platinum or Reserve so you can get an uplift in bonus miles.

HTH

FWIW, on the return from Venice, I'd recommend an 8 am or later flight so you can take cheaper transportation options than a private water taxi. Those were running €110-125 when I was there. (I had a 6:30 am flight.)

You have linkedd to the standard award chart on delta.dumb. I repeat: There is no one way level at 62.5K one way. In fact, if you read the details of DL's FF program more carefully, you will see that one way award tickets cost the same number of miles as RT award tickets at the same level. Moreover, there is absolutely no rule that certain months of the year or other periods are necessarily considered to be high season. Perhaps only high awards are available now for certain flights and certain dates but that could change and tomorrow DL could add low award tickets for the desired date and flights to their award inventory.

Fair enough. It isn't my primary (or even secondary) program, and I don't know it that well.

Then you might avoid posting things that will confuse people. Fights on partners will be low only, so 60K rt in Y and 100K in J. You can do,Y one way and J the other for 80K. Avoid DL metal, and things usually work out OK. AZ can also be good if you get one of their new A330s.

You can get the BIZ DELTA GOLD card and pick up a quick 30k. If you want a special flight you need to be up front! Just 50k more for 200k for 2 low level biz seats round trip.

Welcome to MP btw!

This was a helpful post. Nice to see actual flight suggestions.

The taxes shown on this award strike me as unusually high. I am in Paris at present with my family on four low miles DL J awards...on flights operated by AF. Fees were $135+/- each. Are the fees into Italy so much higher?

The $1000 per pax taxes seemed extreme, but the 200k miles is good. Here's what I got in a quick check.
360k miles and $136 each passenger for taxes.

and here's an alternate, sitting in the back of the bus, total 250k miles and $94 taxes. Doing a pay with miles you could make this work, although I don't like the 1:30 layover at JFK. The alternate was a 5 hr layover.

The 360k miles is due to the Delta segment if I'm understanding the prior posts correctly.

then were the high taxes due to flying AF? Maybe AF is treated as separate arrivals and departures at CDG instead of transit?

I'm guessing, if it's anything like BA, that it's for flying AF only through Europe, so yeah. I'm curious if KL would come up lower for taxes. If I weren't in the middle of a rush project and taking a moment out for MP, I'd check myself.

AF/KLM charge fuel surcharges, DL does not. The screenshot is from from the flying blue website (much better for searching availability than DL's by the way) and thus quotes high surcharges.

Ahh, so it is like BA (through Europe, which is one reason I booked my OW segments on BA in Asia only as the surcharges were more reasonable there).

Here are the taxes on Delta for the itinerary given, fwiw.

For a low Delta award, we really should be more concerned with getting to a gateway than finding the TATL leg though. TATL is the easy part.

This was a Flying Blue quote and AF/KLM charges some serious fuel surcharges on their award tickets. I just did a DL/KE J award to SYD and it was only ~$130 in taxes and fees.

First off let me say thanks for all of the great replies....even if I can only understand every fourth reply, lol.
I see Delta is offering a 75% bonus when buying miles with a max of 65,000 (actually 105,000 with bonus) for $2100 or $0.02 per mile. That gets me to almost 230,000 if needed.
Thanks again and if anyone wants to put their post in laymans terms I will do my best to follow instructions.

What is flying blue?
The dates to be in Venice are July 18ish through July 25this

Flying Blue is the name of the combined frequent flier program of Air France and KLM. They are Delta partners through mutual membership in SkyTeam.

So, it sounds like your airfare's doable -- have you started looking for hotels yet?

I signed up for Flying Blue thru Air France....I can use my Skymiles with them? How do they know?

I have a great place I stayed at before on the Guidecca Canal thanks!