Introduction

It looks like we’re getting more flights to Taipei!

Flights to Taiwan has been incredibly in demand these last few years, and it looks like Delta Airlines is expanding service from Taipei to Seattle starting the summer of 2024.

Breakdown

Starting June 7, 2024, Delta will begin flying on a new daily, year-round flight between Seattle (SEA) and Taipei (TPE). This particular new flight will operate with the following schedule:

DL69 Seattle to Taipei departing 11:15AM arriving 3:15PM (+1 day)
DL68 Taipei to Seattle departing 5:25PM arriving 2:05PM

Timeframe should be approximately 13 hours westbound and 11 hours and 40min eastbound. Delta will use an Airbus A330-900neo for the route, featuring 281 seats. This includes 29 business class (Delta One) seats, 28 premium economy (Premium Select) seats, and 224 economy class (Main Cabin) seats.

This new addition seems pretty important and unique for Delta, as it’s never really flown non-stop from the United States to Taipei. Most folks utilize China Airlines for direct flights to and from Taipei to the United States. Currently at San Francisco and Los Angeles, there are a ton of flights from United, China Airlines, Eva Airlines, and Starlux Airlines. With United currently being the only US airline to fly direct, this now makes Delta the second U.S. Airlines to fly directly to Taiwan. Per the breakdown from OMAAT, it is interesting to see that Delta is utilizing SEA as their hub for this flight:

Currently, EVA Air operates Seattle to Taipei flights with 7-10x weekly frequencies. Since EVA Air is in Star Alliance, it’s reach with United is set there. It’s a pretty packed flight too, as evident on one of my trips back from there.

The new and awesome Starlux Airlines plans to launch a Seattle to Taipei route in 2024, and has a partnership with Alaska, so will have quite a bit of connectivity there. Alaska will not want to cede any market with Delta in at Seattle, given it’s their hub.
In addition, Alaska Airlines is hoping to acquire Hawaiian Airlines, which means the airline will resume flights to Asia, assuming this all gets approved. This could help bridge Alaska to the Asia market.
As it stands right now, Delta is well positioned for this route in terms of demand and connecting traffic. The airline has a big domestic network in Seattle to feed into this, and also partners with SkyTeam carrier China Airlines in Taipei, so will have connectivity there as well.

From my perspective, it would seem that Delta is looking to protect its turf from the upcoming Starlux arrival and its partner, Alaska from grabbing more Asia market share. If they really wanted to launch flights to Taipei, Los Angeles would have been a stronger choice. Nevertheless, it is nice for the customer to have upcoming deals from Seattle to Taipei, given that there will be 3x airlines flying directly to Taiwan.

Now we before we get excited…

Delta Redemptions are horrendous.

If you’re looking to redeem Delta Skymiles for this flight, I would highly recommend against it. Flights can range from anywhere of 120,000 miles to 1,500,000+ miles (yes, that’s not a typo). They’re called SkyPesos for a reason and it’s absolutely not worth spending your time on.

However, as Delta is part of the Skyteam alliance, the Skyteam’s partner airline programs may utilize these routes down the road, making KLM-AirFrance Flying Blue a worth alternative. Time will tell if these award redemptions will appear on Flying Blue and other partner inventories.

Conclusion

With the upcoming inclusion of Seattle to Taipei starting June 7th, 2024, Delta Airlines will launch direct flights to Taiwan. As competitive as this market is from the West Coast, it’s intriguing to see Delta join the fray with the likes of United, Eva Air, China Airlines, and Starlux Airlines.