Delta Credit Cards Update of 2024
So, on February 1st, 2024, American Express raised the annual fees on both the personal and business versions of the Delta Gold, Delta Platinum, and Delta Reserve cards. And, of course, in typical Delta American Express card fashion, they did so suddenly and without warning. And now that it’s been several days and we’ve had time to reflect and think about these changes, I think it’s important to do a deep dive on them because it’s very telling about the future of American Express and what to expect from them moving forward in a 2024 world and beyond.
And when I first saw these changes with the Delta credit cards, I first thought to myself, why should I even care? I mean, I don’t fly Delta and I don’t have any of their credit cards and have no plans to do so. So do these changes even really affect me? And the answer is it doesn’t directly affect me.
Still, it does indirectly because I do have credit card strategies that involve American Express, and that may change depending on how American Express decides to update their cards in the future. And so that’s why I think it’s important to take a look at these changes, even though you may not be a frequent user of Delta credit cards.
Best Delta Credit Cards for skymiles
The first is someone who, you may be like me, where you don’t use Delta cards at all and just likes to use credit cards as part of your strategy for whatever you’re using them for. And so that’s one person or one set of people. The second is going to be the people who fly Delta frequently. And, of course, for those people, I think we’re all pretty much on the same page that these Delta changes can be very positive for them.
But then there’s that middle category where there are people that may travel infrequently on Delta but frequently enough that it wouldn’t matter. So say one to two times per year, maybe even more than that, depending on kind of your situation. But that’s when you have to really critically think about whether or not these credit cards are worth it for you based on these new changes. And so, I’m going to go over them in detail and explain what you need to know about each change and what that means about American Express.
Now, this discussion will be divided into four separate parts. The first is going to be what’s on top of everyone’s mind, which is the annual fee increases. And we’ll also talk about the limited time welcome offers too, because those have been increasing as well. But the issue is that they’re becoming less valuable due to the increase in the spend requirement too.
The second is going to be about the statement credit specifically on these Delta credit cards and why American Express decided to choose certain statement credits in a certain frequency on each one. And, of course, those are going to be very nice to talk about for those of you who are Delta loyalists or fly Delta very frequently. And so I’ll go into that in more detail as well.
The last is going to be my raw thoughts about what this means for you when it comes to looking at American Express cards in the future. And just to get out of the way now, the Delta blue card is still there. It’s no annual fee Delta card, but Delta didn’t really touch it and didn’t make any changes to it, which is pretty reflective of what they are looking for in their new credit card lineup. They don’t really care about that card. And really, neither should you unless you want to have one for a downgrade path.
Annual Fees and Welcome Offers
- Best Feature: Bonus miles with flight credit
- Annual Fee: $0 introductory annual fee for the first year, then $150.
- Best Feature: Annual companion certificate
- Annual Fee: $350
- Best Feature: Premium perks
- Annual Fee: $650
The annual fee changes on each one of these Sky Miles cards. And it’s pretty consistent between personal and business. So for the Delta gold card, it’s now $0 intro annual fee for the first year, then $150, which is up from $95 previously. The Delta platinum card has a new annual fee of $350 for both the personal and business up from $250. The Delta Reserve card now has an annual fee of $650, which is up from a previous yearly payment of $550. So it’s about $100 increase on the platinum reserve and around $55 on the gold card.
What I think is important to understand about this is that American Express is now setting a new standard for what annual fees should be for the mid-tier category. There’s actually a separation between, I guess, you would say, a lower-tier mid-tier category and a higher-tier mid-tier category. So, in terms of the Delta gold card, it’s a $150 annual fee after the second year.
But that is also consistent with what happened with the Hilton refreshes when we saw the surplus got changed back in October of last year, which that surplus card is now $150, too. So now we can say that the mid-tier standard is going to be $150. And that’s what we would expect to see as we see more and more cards get refreshed in this category. Now, for the upper tier category, for the Delta platinum, it’s $250 to $350. So that’s a $100 fee increase.
That’s going to be the new standard for the upper tier of that middle-class, middle-tier category. So when we look at cards like the Amex gold card, which still has that $250 annual fee, I expect, at minimum, for that card to increase to $350 just based on what we’re seeing here with this Delta platinum card, of course, the reserve card is $650, that’s the same as the Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant card. It’s a little bit more than the Hilton Aspire card as that was recently changed. But again, I think the higher-tier cards are now going to be at that $600 level.
And that may even cause the platinum card to be boosted even higher than that based on this new tier, what we have for these annual fees. Now we look at the welcome offers for each one of these cards, you can see that they also have been updated too. There’s the $70k limited offer for $3k spent in six months on the Delta personal gold, $90k for $4k spent in six months for the Delta platinum, and $100k miles for $6k spent in six months for the Delta Reserve. And so the Delta business has $80,000 miles for $6,000 spent in six months. The Delta platinum business has $100k miles for $8,000 spent in six months.
And the Delta reserve card for business has $110,000 miles for $12,000 spent in six months. And so you can see that even though the number of miles you get back on each one of these cards is pretty similar to what we’ve seen in the past, the minimum spend requirements have become much higher. And so the value that you get back per dollar spent on a welcome offer basis is a lot less. And that’s just the nature of what’s been happening in the broader overall world these days with higher inflation and higher prices. That’s just reflective of that.
And so I think we should continue to see that happening throughout all the different welcome offers that we see. But I think depending on your use case and what you’re looking for, they may be worth it for you. Because as we all know, welcome offers are the best way to get the most amount of miles in a very short period. And this is happening across all American Express credit cards, too. So if you look at the Amex Gold card, for example, that minimum spend requirement is now $6,000.
And with the Amex Platinum card, that’s an $8,000 minimum spend requirement as well, even though it’s over six months, so it’s not as bad. And that’s also reflected here on these Delta cards with that extended welcome offer period of six months. There’s still more spending to be done. And so we have to keep that in mind when we think of these welcome offers is that they’re going to continue to raise that minimum spend requirement. But hopefully, this will be kind of the standard from here on out.
Delta Statement Credits
And that’s going to be the statement credits and also the Delta specific benefits. And I’ll first start with these statement credits. And when I look at these credits, I would say that they’re definitely intentional on the part of American Express and Delta. You can clearly see that there are lots more statement credits on the Platinum and Reserve cards and a lot less on the Gold card. And if we calculate all the different statement credits, and we mathematically organize it in a way that if you’ve taken advantage of all the statement credits, actually every single one of these cards does get you net positive value.
But the method in which you have to do that is pretty roundabout and not as straightforward as it should be. And so I want first to start the discussion with the Delta Gold and Gold business cards with the Delta Flight credit and the Delta Stays credit.
So, with the Delta airlines card, and this is only, by the way, on the Delta Gold card, it’s to get $200 back in a statement credit after you spend $10,000 on the card. And I see where they’re going with this because I’m sure if you look back, and if American Express looks back at their other products, we all know that welcome offers are the best way to get the best value on your card, but you’re not always going to have a welcome offer.
So, a lot of times, the secondary benefit or the next best way is to have some kind of minimum spend on the card itself, and then you can get some sort of reward for that. We had that $15,000 in spend to get that free net award. And I think we can all say that that’s a pretty nice reward, provided you had that $15,000 in spend. So it’s the same idea with this Delta Gold and Gold business card.
It looks like, from the way these statement credits are organized, that American Express and Delta want to push you towards a Platinum and Reserve card, especially because of all those Delta-specific benefits if you’re a Delta frequent traveler or Delta loyalist. But then they’re wondering what they can do with this Gold card to have you get this card and keep it open.
And I think this is their solution to that problem, is they’re trying to give you a spend multiplier to hit after you get the welcome offer so that you can get that additional value. Now, I’m afraid I have to disagree with $200 being that big of a deal because there are much better ways to get $200 than by putting $10,000 of spend in a Delta card. That’s a little bit ridiculous. $200 for 10,000 spent is calculated .
Again, they’re trying to give you a reason to spend on this card. And this, although it is a good try, I don’t really think it’s a great way to do this. And that’s kind of what my thoughts are on the Delta Flight credit. Now, the next credit, which I think is very interesting, is the Delta Stays credit. And that’s across all different cards, right? And so all other cards are the Gold, Reserve, and Platinum.
So, for the Delta Gold and Gold business, you get $100 annual credit and $150 yearly credit, respectively. For the Platinum Platinum business, you get a $150 yearly credit and a $200 annual credit, respectively. And for the Delta Reserve and Reserve business, you get a $200 yearly credit and $250 annual credit, respectively, on those cards, too.to be 2% cash back, essentially. And there are plenty of better ways to get 2% cash back in any different card you can think of.
And with the Gold business card, you get that $150 annual credit, and that actually can pay for the yearly fee right off the bat. But it’s interesting, because if you look at the other two credits we’ll look at in a second, the Resi credit and the Rider credit, which are monthly statement credits, the Delta Stays credit is an annual credit. And this was done on purpose.
They definitely realize that annual credits are used more often. So what better credit to use than their vacation rental or their travel portal-style thing to get that credit to get that easily back? They didn’t make this credit a semi-annual, quarterly, or monthly credit. They made an annual credit so you could be able to use it easily.
Just like a lot of different credit card issuers, not just America Express, but just everyone in general, everyone’s trying to push their travel portal on us. And so I think this is Delta’s way of trying to make that on us, too. Of course, there are some benefits to the Delta Vacations portal; for example, we’ll get to this later on, but you get that one MQD point for every $1 spent on a Delta Vacations booking. So that is helpful from that perspective.
But I think it’s very interesting that they chose an annual credit for this one, as opposed to the other credits, which we’re going to talk about in a second. But again, I think it’s really nice that at least the Delta Gold business card has that 150 annual credit because that does really pay for that annual fee as long as you use it. And even with that $10,000 in spend, getting that $200 back, it is very feasible to get $10,000 in spend on a business card because that’s kind of what they’re for. I think it’s less likely to have that on a Delta Gold personal card.
But as far as the value that we get back as consumers, it’s going to be more on the person who is more of an infrequent Delta traveler for that Delta Gold card because the benefits are much better on the Platinum and the Reserve card.
Moving on to the Resi credit, there is a new credit on the Delta Platinum and the Delta Reserve cards, both personal and business, and they’re equal on both, where you get a $10 Resi credit on the Delta Platinum and Platinum business, and a $20 monthly credit on the Delta Reserve and Reserve business. And Resi is this food reservation platform, kind of like Yelp or something you’d see on other types of websites where they can reserve food.
It’s not going to be towards every restaurant, but they are targeting people that are going to more urban centers where Resi is more prominent. And so if you go to those larger cities, you’ll be able to see more restaurants on Resi and you could potentially be able to use this more often. But the problem is, this is a monthly credit again. We always talk about how these credits should be more easy to use.
And the monthly credit is, we kind of get why American Express is doing it, but it’s not something that I think we’d use every month. And I believe American Express knows this, which is why they provide it for you, saying, oh, you get $240 of Resi credit with the Delta Reserve, and you get $120 on the Platinum. But really, it’s just the monthly credit. So whether or not you use the full credit or not is going to depend on your use case, but highly likely, it’s not going to be something that you do every month unless you make it a point to do so.
I can say the same thing for the Rideshare credit, too, where you get $10 of monthly credit, $120 total on both the Platinum and Platinum business, as well as the Reserve and Reserve business. And so this doesn’t cover Rideshare, but nothing like Uber Eats like we have seen on the Gold card and the Platinum card, because those are more flexible.
So, what I want to focus on regarding this Rideshare credit is that it’s more restrictive in that it’s just the Rideshare. And this is by design because why would they offer you a delivery service credit to compete with their own Resi credit, which, as we all know, is owned by American Express? And so everything that they do with these credits is very intentional.
And I think it’s really interesting because when you take the Delta Stays credit, the Resi credit, and the Rideshare credit all taken together, what they’re doing is trying to make this card a one-stop shop for your travel needs. So, if you think about it, if you spend money on your Delta Reserve and Platinum card, they want you to book your flight on your Delta card. They want you to book your prepaid hotel on the Delta card, as well as the vacation rental, perchance.
They want you to eat out with your Delta card using the Resi credit. They also want you to travel, not airfare, but transit and Rideshare, as well as we come to the bottom here; we also have Hertz’s present circle status on the Reserve and five-star status on the Platinum. So you can cover that on your Delta card as well. There are no spending multipliers on that. But of course, that offer is there. So they’re covering every part of your travel itinerary on these Delta cards.
They want to push you to spend on these cards as much as you can and offer the statement credit saying, oh, hey, you get this value on it, which is true; you do. But I think it’s always interesting to, again, look at the Stays credit, which is annual. They could have very easily made the Resi credit and Rideshare credit annual, too, but of course, they didn’t. So we have to have these other monthly credits, which are present but not necessarily going to be the easiest to use.
Delta-Specific Credit Benefits
So now that we’ve covered the statement credits on each card let’s go over the Delta-specific benefits that also occur, but mostly on the Platinum and Platinum business, as well as the Reserve and Reserve business versions of the Delta amex card lineup. And as I said in the last section, I think they’re trying to push people away from the gold card and push you more towards the Platinum and the Reserve card, especially if you fly a lot on Delta, because there’s a lot of benefits on these sky miles cards that are very, very helpful to when you fly with them and when it comes to medallion status.
And so the first thing I want to cover is the MQD Head Start that’s been revamped on these cards, and it’s across both the Platinum and the Reserve card on the personal business side, which is an annual $2,500 boost to that medallion status. Now, as we all know, there are certain tier requirements to get to silver, gold, and the other higher tiers. Silver is a minimum of $5,000. So having that 50% boost, basically having it cut in half, is very helpful for those of you who are going to go for silver status.
Now, the issue is that it’s only $2,100, and there are only certain ways you can get the extra qualifying dollars. The first way is to just spend on Delta or buy Delta flights. And so that’s going to get you one MQD for every dollar spent. There’s also, we’ve mentioned previously, the Delta vacations.
And then the third way is going to be with this MQD boost situation we’ll cover in just a moment, where you can spend money on your Delta Platinum or Delta Reserve cards and, for a certain amount of money, get additional MQDs as well. But what was interesting about this MQD Head Start is that actually, if you look really in terms of conditions, you can actually stack these credits on each card.
So, for example, if you have the Platinum card and the Reserve card, each of them gives you $2,500 in MQDs. So, if you had both of those cards, you would actually get 5,000 MQDs or automatic silver status. Now, that’s still not, I think, the best way to do it because there are two reasons why I wouldn’t do that. The first is that it costs you $1,000 in annual fees, which maybe that’s worth it to you, but perhaps it’s not.
But the second reason also is American Express in general. So American Express, as you all know, usually has a credit card limit where you can have up to five credit cards, or between four and six, depending on the person.
But for the most part, on average, I’ve seen a lot of people be capped out at five. So if you do this, you actually take two slots, and Delta cards hold them. So, for example, if you want to run a Hilton-based ladder strategy or you want to have any other American Express credit cards that you prefer, now you have two fewer to use.
Now, if you want to go kind of crazy on this and get four Delta cards, Delta Platinum, Delta Platinum Business, Delta Reserve, and Delta Reserve Business, that would get you 10,000 MQDs just by itself. And for the low, low price of $2,000, you can literally buy Delta Gold Medallion status.
So, that may be the only credit card you have. And this is, again, I think it’s by design. Delta wants you to spend on their cards. We all know how much, how profitable these cards have been for them. So they have every incentive in the world to make you spend or incentivize you to spend on their cards or even have their cards open.
So that’s what I wanted to cover about the MQD Head Start, which brings us to the next category, which is the MQD Boost. So assuming you only get one of these cards and only get $1,200 of the boost, you now have to make up another $1,200 in spend to get to that first Silver Elite status. That’s going to be probably the best way to do this. But if you wanted to use just spend on the card, for the Delta Platinum and Platinum business, it’s for every $20 you spend, you get $1 of MQD.
So if you do the math on that, if you never spent any Delta or Delta vacation style of spending on the card and just did straight-up regular expenditures, about $50,000 of regular spending on the Platinum card or $25,000 of spending on the Reserve card to generate that $2,200 in MQDs that you need to get to Silver status, which is ridiculous. You’d never do that, right? Of course, that’s a very niche case. You’re not going just to spend any Delta flights on your Delta credit card.
But that’s just something to think about is that I don’t think it’s something that you should take seriously because you may spend money on a card that’s not for Delta or Delta vacation, but I wouldn’t use this as a way to boost yourself to get to MQDs. There are better ways to do this, as we mentioned, and maybe even better in this situation to get two of these Delta cards to get that MQD boost because you’re going to get $2,200 per card that you get. And so that may be the better strategy if you want to go for those Silver statuses or Gold statuses.
Again, if you are a business and you fly Delta often and you have a high spend on your card, maybe that would be worth it for you and perhaps these MQDs would be helpful. I think, on the personal side, that is kind of ridiculous. I don’t think you’d ever want to spend money on the individual side because you have so many other types of credit cards out there, American Express or non-American Express credit cards you could pay to get much better value. So for a business, I can kind of see it working.
For a personal, it’s nice to have, but I would take it very seriously. And so the next thing that actually was revamped, and these next two are actually positive, in my opinion, is a companion certificate and the complimentary upgrades you get when you have these cards. So, to start with the companion certificate first, they didn’t enhance these certificates. So it’s basically you purchase a flight on Delta. It could be certain types of fare codes, and I’m not going to go into that.
But basically, it’s a round-trip ticket. And if you pay for that ticket, your companion will fly for you for free, provided you pay the taxes that are going to be there. It’s $8 for domestic and $250 for international, something like that. And so that’s nice because they also have that option. But then you also enhance it to the fact we can get not only to the 48 contiguous United States but also to Alaska, Hawaii, Mexico, and some Caribbean countries, as well as Central America.
And so, just based on that alone, maybe a way for you to offset that annual fee on top of all the other benefits we just discussed. So again, this is great news for Delta loyalists. But if you don’t really fly Delta, or you fly them maybe occasionally, it’s kind of questionable whether or not you get value on these cards. But for those Delta loyalists, this is fantastic. And the compliment upgrade, I think it’s more of a not a throwaway, but if you’re having the platinum and reserve cards, my guess is you probably have some type of medallion status.
So having the compliment upgrade without medallion status, I think is a nice perk. I think it’s a way for them to initiate people into the Delta ecosystem, saying, hey, we’ll give you this upgrade if you’d like if you don’t have status yet. But if you’re going for the platinum reserve card, you’re likely flying Delta on a somewhat regular basis.
And given that they have so much spread in the United States that are one of the top carriers, one of the big four, there’s plenty of people who do fly Delta regularly, even just occasionally, like three to four times a year, that would be enough for them to consider this as a positive boost. So I think that given all of these Delta benefits, there are a lot of things here for Delta loyalists, but again, not as much if you’re not someone who flies Delta very frequently. All right. So those are the major changes to the Delta credit card lineup.
Take-home Points
And so now that we’ve discussed all of those changes, what does that mean for us as consumers, as well as what does that tell us about American Express and Delta moving forward? It’s no big secret, and it’s nothing groundbreaking, but basically, what Delta and Amex want you to do is to spend on their cards and keep their cards open for as long as possible. And it’s very clear from the statement credits and the benefits from Delta that they’re really focusing on the platinum and the reserve cards, both personal and business.
The blue card it’s not even something that you change, so they don’t even care about that. It’s just only for your benefit if you want a product change down from one card to that card. The gold card is otherwise interesting too, because it has this $0 intro annual fee, which is nice.
After all, if you want to get the cards for the welcome offer, I think that would be a great way to do so because you would get the card, spend on the welcome offer, or spend for the welcome offer, get the miles, wait a year, cancel the card, and then you’re done with it. Cancel, I guess, or product changes the Delta blue card, as we discussed before.
It’s really more for the platinum and the reserve cards. For the gold business, I can see that if you want to try the Delta stage credit for $150, that does negate the annual fee, which is also $150. But the personal Delta gold card only gets a $100 version of that.
And so I don’t think that’s even necessary to even worry about. So the Delta gold, from my perspective, is more just a one and done welcome offer card, which I can’t really say for the platinum or the reserve card because they do have a lot of good benefits. And even if you’re an intermediate or even a frequent Delta traveler, you’re going to be going for either the platinum or the reserve card anyway.
On the line of having a lot of spend on these cards, Delta is also focusing on big spenders, which are mostly business spenders. They have these MQD boost things on there. I think it’s helpful. Again, not something that I would focus on. It’s more beneficial to book Delta vacations and Delta flights, getting one MQD for every dollar spent because getting $20 or $10 back it’s fine, but it doesn’t really move the needle. You are much better off doing the strategy where you would do an MQD head start and just get two of these cards just automatically to get you for silver status.
Again, it’s a $1,000 cost, but if you try to do the platinum and platinum business by itself, that would be only $700, which is not nearly as bad, but something that you can think about and different strategies to consider too. One other thing and takeaway I got from these changes is, as I mentioned earlier that Delta wants you to spend on their cards, but they want to make this almost like a suite of travel benefits for you to use and ways to spend your card for your travel stay.
This is beneficial for both American Express and Delta as well because, as we all know, Delta stays owned by Delta. American Express will get the transaction fee on that. American Express owns Rezzy. They get the transaction fee on that. And so you’ve booked your flight on Delta.
You book your food through your Rezzy credit. You travel using Rideshare, so you have the Rideshare credit. You may rent a car, too, so you have that Hertz five-star present circle status, depending on if you have the platinum reserve cards. And so you can see how they’re starting to build this ecosystem where it’s really with just the Delta suite of products. And so they’re trying to encourage you to use these credits so you can get the value. But of course, they want to do that in the way they want you to, which is to do those monthly credits.
That’s another big thing about these changes. They really want the Delta loyalists to stay with them and use their credit cards for everything. And with these Delta changes and these MQD head start and then could de-boost things with their cards, it’s very clear that that’s the case. Now, using these cards is going to be a personal decision.
And so it’s going to be very interesting to see how each co-branded credit card or each just branded credit card changes their annual fee, changes their statement credit, if we see any new statement credits or any more frequent statement credits that come on these cards because it’s definitely coming. And if we can take a look at history, for example, to the Amex Business Gold card, if we look back at the Hilton Honors cards back in late 2023 and how they changed those, we can start to see a pattern of what American Express is doing. And the pattern is clearly more statement credits and higher annual fees.
