Hi, I'm Namaan, this is Jenny Rae for Management Consulted, and I'm here today
to talk about why she made a crazy travel decision regarding her perks and
status. You ready to share with us why you leveled off at Delta Platinum
instead of bumping up to Delta Diamond? So Delta introduced the Medallion tier
of diamonds after I was a frequent flyer. For a number of years I've been a Delta
Platinum, since 2005. So in 2018 we're filming this video. That's 13 years so
far and I have no plans to stop anytime soon. So number one, I understood the
perks of Delta Platinum. They were really clear to me. It made sense, and also I
felt like there was a tremendous amount of value there. I also felt like there
was a huge differentiating factor between going from Gold, to Platinum.
Mainly the couple things that really matter to me, are that at the Platinum
level you get one choice benefit, which is partly recouping some of your spend, or
some of your features of what you're doing, you have better upgrade
availability which I think is noticeable between the two tiers. But the two
things that are really most important to me. Number one, for Delta platinum you're
able to re-Bank mileage tickets. So I book a lot of tickets very early in
the process, which is actually become more valuable over time as tickets have
gone more to a per dollar rate, as opposed to just a flat rate for the
route. And in addition, I'm able to get what I think is a really important
difference which is the Platinum Line. So I'm able to get a basically
direct line to somebody at Delta, at any time of the day or night. And I use that
a lot. And so going from Gold to Platinum, those were always easy choices. Going
from Platinum to Diamond, you have a lot of very similar differences in the perks.
But the differences are still incremental. So the choice ends up
becoming, do you go for Delta Diamond, which is an extra 50,000 MQM's flown
miles. And usually I'm using my card spend MQM's toward the Platinum in the
first place. So that's really thinking about flying the extra
50,000 miles. And often I will level off somewhere in the 100,000 to the
125,000 range. In general, at the end of the year I will
book miles tickets instead of paid tickets to keep myself from going
diamond for this reason alone. Take notes, because the one thing that you get when
you're at status for Delta is the ability to roll over any excess MQM's.
So my choice ends up not just becoming, do I want to become Diamond or
not, but do I want to become Diamond this year, and potentially not even make
Platinum in the following year? So I usually will accrue at least 25,000 MQM's before
the end of the year, so that I have a 25,000 MQM head start for the following year.
So my preference has been to maintain Platinum, to give myself a
little flexibility to fly when it makes sense for international trips, to fly a
direct route instead of flying Delta, or to fly on routes in the US for example,
we do a lot of work in Chicago with Chicago schools, and Delta has terrible
service from the West Coast to Chicago. So, I want to be able to just fly on United or
American or even Southwest, directly to Chicago when I'm going there. And I don't
want to feel like I'm forced, every time just to accrue miles to get there. So
that 25,000-ish mile cushion every year gives me the freedom to do that. That's the
main reason why I choose to level off at Platinum, instead of going Diamond.
There you have it, why she stayed at Platinum instead of Diamond. If you have amazing
stories about your frequent flyer pursuits, how you did a crazy mileage run,
or which status you're pursuing on which airline, it's really fun to talk about it.
So please share your stories with us at www.managementconsulted.com.