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If you pursued Delta Air Lines Medallion status for this year and came up a little shy of what you realistically tried achieving, all hope might not be lost.
Is Delta Gifting Status?
We’ve heard stories of Delta proactively gifting status to some SkyMiles members. We also know people who contacted Delta on their own and asked for a favor.
Eye of the Flyer readers (and longtime point.me clients) Vicki and Glen fly Delta about once a month. Glen is close to hitting the 2 Million Miler mark. (Enjoy that lifetime Platinum status, Glen!) The couple took a mid-December trip to Cape Town on Delta and Virgin Atlantic airlines because they wanted to lock up Diamond Medallion status for Vicki. (They also enjoyed a great safari, too.) When they returned, Vicki realized she was just $8 MQD short of last year’s required $20,000 threshold.
Vicki called Delta customer service and asked if Delta would please gift her those 8 MQD. The reps basically told her to pound sand and take another Delta trip to earn the eight bucks worth of MQD.
Glen suggested that Vicki contact Delta’s CEO, Ed Bastian, something which Glen tells us he’s done a “number of times over the years when there have been egregious issues or problems that needed attention.” (Hey, remember that Mr. Bastian explicitly said to e-mail him if you have a problem.)
So, she dropped him a line.
“He literally emailed me back in (two) minutes, saying he would take care of it for me and make sure I got (Diamond) status,” she said.
She later received a response from someone in Delta’s Loyalty department. They confirmed Mr. Bastian’s directive and handled Vicki’s upgrade to Diamond Medallion.
One of our colleagues, Andrew Kunesh, has a story about someone being given Gold status and notes that a Delta spokesperson told him, “This is something we do every year for select Medallion Members who were just shy of achieving that next Status tier, and we love being able to reward them for their loyalty.”
But there’s another example — and it’s very generous. Another colleague, Clint Henderson, detailed someone with had more than enough MQD for Platinum — but was more than 23,000 Medallion Qualification Miles (MQM) shy of the PM status. Delta contacted him and granted Platinum status.
For an airline that seemingly wants to make earning status more difficult, spotting someone almost a full tier’s worth of MQM seems like an interesting move.
So, if you fell short of your Medallion goals for 2024, consider contacting Delta and laying out a case as to why they should upgrade your status. Now, make it something worth their while. Don’t waste anyone’s time. Show them how you’re a loyal customer, spend a bunch of money on their co-branded Delta Amex credit cards, etc.
Final Approach
Delta Air Lines is gifting some Medallion members status — something they do each year. Are you going to ask Delta for a favor? Did Delta do you a solid? Share your thoughts in the below Comments section!
Advertiser Disclosure: Eye of the Flyer, a division of Chatterbox Entertainment, Inc., is part of an affiliate sales network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites, such as CreditCards.com. Some or all of the card offers that appear on the website are from advertisers. Compensation may impact how and where card products appear on the site. This site does not include all card companies or all available card offers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by any of these entities. Some of the links on this page are affiliate or referral links. We may receive a commission or referral bonus for purchases or successful applications made during shopping sessions or signups initiated from clicking those links.
Responses are not provided or commissioned by the bank advertiser. Responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by the bank advertiser. It is not the bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.
I landed on my last trip of the year on the morning of 12/31/23 thinking (based on my spreadsheet) I would have 20,028 MQDs and maintain Diamond status. When I checked my Skymiles account, I was actually 53 MQDs short. I spent a lot of time on the phone with an agent going back through the calculations to see if we could find the discrepancy. The agent also applied for an “exception” just in case we couldn’t legitimately fined the 53 MQDs I needed. I got an approval on the exception (and was granted 2024 Diamond status) before we even figured out whether the MQDs were correct. They ended up finding the error in the calculation, so it turned out I didn’t need the exception. But, if they hadn’t found that error, I would’ve still been able to maintain Diamond thanks to that exception.
What is Ed Bastian’s e-mail address?
In this post, there’s a link to another site that published it.
I had the same thing happen at the end of 2022 (8 bucks short of platinum on MQDs, plenty of MQMs to spare) and the phone agent said they couldn’t promise me a gimmie. So I wasted half a day taking a stupid one-way 30 min flight from BDL to LGA and getting a ride back. Now I’m in the opposite camp – blew past MQDs but missed MQMs by 11k. Just checked the app and I seem to have platinum still?
Contact Ed Bastian and see if they’ll throw you a bone.
We maintain our status through the end of January. You will see the status change on February 1.
I was Diamond in 2023. Took a lot of expensive, but short, business trips. Blew well past the Diamond MQD qualification spend level. Was 25K MQM‘s short of Diamond though. I would not have even considered asking for a status exception, except that I saw all of the postings online of folks who had been granted status, even when nowhere near the qualifications. Also, Delta is really focused on MQDs, and I more than met that requirement. So I asked, but I was declined. It probably did not help that I do not have a Delta credit card.
Out of curiosity, who did you ask?
I called, and spoke to a Diamond representative. That person submitted the request to some sort of SkyMiles account team. I got an email two or three days later with the no. Did not try Ed 😉
I’d take 10 minutes and give it a shot.
Question – If you’re gifted the necessary MQMs, MQDs, or just a direct exemption do you get the associated Choice Benefit for that level?
Based on my account it looks like I MIGHT have been “gifted” DM even though I fell well short of the MQD requirement for 2024 but with loads of extra MQMs; however, when I look at Choice Benefits selection it only shows a Platinum choice for 2024. I don’t think that I’ll know definitively if I was so fortunate until sometime in February when everything fully resets.
I’d assume you get the Choice Benefit. Let us know what happens in February!
At the end of 2023 I was Silver Medallion. I was well over MQD requirement for Gold, but 216 MQM short. I got an email on the 10th telling me that Delta was gifting me Gold status in appreciation for my long loyalty.
It was a nice gesture at a good time since my wife and I were discussing if we were getting good value paying for First Class anymore.
Well played Delta.