SkyMiles to Australia for 25k roundtrip: that was real, and it signals a bigger shift.

Delta just let unadvertised award sales drop to Australia and New Zealand from as low as 25,400 SkyMiles roundtrip, including the nonstop LAX-BNE and LAX-AKL plus connecting flights from nearly 200 U.S. cities. The sale was never promoted and rates shot up within hours on all but the nonstop segments, but hundreds of members locked in bucket-list trips for later this year. This is not an isolated glitch: Delta has dropped record-low award rates on Delta One Suites to Tokyo, Rome, Venice, Dublin, Barcelona, London, Taipei, Hong Kong, and more in the last six weeks alone, without advertising any of them. The Delta hub penalty is fading, and pricing from secondary and regional airports now often matches the nonstop rates.

The play: Set alerts for Delta SkyMiles flash sales through a monitoring service, and book immediately when sub-30k roundtrip awards to Oceania or similarly deep cuts on premium cabins appear.