Rookie Sunday: How to check your Delta gift card balance? How many gift cards on one e-ticket / per trip?

Welcome to a regular feature on the Renés Points blog. This blog series covers in a “rookie” way either a Delta or travel related theme and attempts to break down to a basic level each topic. You can read up on all the previous posts HERE. Now on to this featured topic.

This may seem like an even more rookie post than most “Rookie Sunday” posts but the inspiration for these tends to be simple mistakes I make and if even I can mess these up my guess is others maybe do as well. Let’s dive in.

The link to check the balance of your Delta gift and e-gift cards is here on Delta.com. You simply type in the number and the security code and it will tell you if you have any “Delta Dollars” left to spend on the card(s).

Now there are a number of things that really frustrate me about Delta e-gifts. The most simple one is after you have checked a number of cards it makes you wait to check more. Really Delta? Quality subcontractor IT at its best once again. The work around is open link in a PVT browser or in another browser and you can keep checking more codes.

So here is what I want you to do today – search all your email (and old email) accounts for “Delta eGift Card” and then take the time to check each code one by one. If you find any valid ones or ones with cash on them save those codes somewhere simple to find again. I myself found a number of cards from YEARS ago from 4x$50 buys with my non-Delta Amex Platinum Business card for the annual travel credit that I had just not saved in a smart place. Oh and one more with a few bucks on it as well (hey, cash is cash right)!

Now that you (and I) have done all of the above it is time to spend these puppies. One Flyer Talker suggested to call Delta and have a bunch of them combined into one (and stated they got it done). I reached out to Delta and was told there is simply no way to do this. I would love for this to be possible and again if there were quality IT on hand I bet it would be a simple task. Ah well. Do keep in mind other airlines allow many more gift cards per ticket than Delta.

The current setup lets you spend 3 per ticket (see above screen shot). But what if you have a bunch of tiny ones? Clearly the best choice, most times, is for all traveling to all be on the same PNR or reservation. It makes free bag waivers from say the Delta Amex cards so much simpler. But if you want to burn as many as possible of the small gift cards you may need to look at separate tickets and even looking at 2x one way vs 1x round trip to use all you can. Thus 2 people on a round trip broken into one ways could use 12 eGift cards in total. Yes, a real pain, but a possible solution (if the one way tickets cost the same as the round trip that is).

Bottom line is since these cards and codes never ever expire why not check to see if you have some that went into the digital abyss and enjoy the savings on your next Delta flight! As a side note, I really wish Delta in our “My Delta” page would allow us to load in these certs to have them all in one simple place – why do you think they do not allow us to do this? 🙁 – René

• UPDATE: See this post from 27FEB19 for NEW information using many gift cards!