A secret AMEX Platinum perk – 50% off Delta Private Jet card, but with a major downgrade.

Delta Private Jets, a few years back, allowed a deposit of as little as $50,000 to get their DPJ card and you then had 2 years to spend that total. Really it was up to 3 years as you just had to book tickets before the 2 years were up so you could, with planning, spread the 50k out. Now I know that “sounds” like a lot but for a large number of flyers they do spend well over $17,000 per year on tickets.

Plus, the perks for making this big deposit were tremendous. You could have NO Delta status and instantly be elevated to Diamond Medallion. Or, if you already were Diamond, you could gift Diamond to anyone you want and the status is good as long as you have the DPJ card. Oh and there is more but I will get to that in a minute.

Then things changed. They doubled the deposit to $100,000. Now you are talking spending $34,000 a year on tickets. Ouch. That is a much smaller number of flyers that can burn that kind of cash on tickets.

Here is the thing you may be missing in this deal – you can spend ALL the DPJ funds booking Delta flights if you want. Plus, you can even get a discount on a number of expensive flights. Not a bad deal for those who book these kinds of tickets.

Well there is a way you can now still get in on the OLD discounted deposit of $50,000 vs the new $100,000. That is if you hold either of the:

   The Platinum Card® from American Express <—LINK

    The Business Platinum® Card from American Express OPEN <—LINK

Either of these cards will allow you to cut the published deposit in half. But, unfortunately, the perks are also more than cut in half as well or worse. One of the biggest perks, the gift of Diamond Medallion status, is excluded if you “only” get the discounted 50k deposit DPJ card.

You are still getting the other perks, and clearly the ability to book DPJ flights if you want, but the loss of Delta’s top elite status is to me a deal breaker.

What I would like to see AMEX provide, along with the reduced deposit needed, is at least Platinum status. After all they have awarded Platinum status for Centurion card holders and to me anyone spending this much money to be part of DPJ should at least have some status as a perk.

What do you think? Did you know about this AMEX Platinum perk? Is there still value without the perk of receiving or being able to gift status to someone? You tell me! – René

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