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Anything booked on the Delta code regardless of the ticketing airline also counted. Those issued by Delta (or by travel agents using Delta ticket stock) counted. While fares and surcharges counted toward the total (taxes didn’t), it only applied to some tickets. That being said, there’s always been one awful, gaping hole in this methodology. And it’s not an unreasonable ask for the airline. For people who are actually flying enough to qualify without playing mileage run games, this shouldn’t be all that hard. Low level elites now need to spend $3,000 during the year. This year, the threshold went up even further. All of a sudden, it also required spending $2,500 MQDs during the year. In other words, the lowest level used to only require 25,000 MQMs. These new Medallion Qualifying Dollars (MQDs) required spending a penny dime per mile required to achieve status. Delta didn’t like that, and I can’t blame the airline. That meant you could do mileage runs at the end of the year and spend little money to squeak over the threshold. Previously, you just had to fly a certain amount and earn enough Medallion Qualifying Miles (MQMs) to make the cut. But that was the only way to make this work.īack in 2013, Delta announced that to qualify for elite status, or uh, Medallion status as the airline calls it, you’d have to spend a certain amount of money with the airline (or you’d have to spend $25,000 a year on the Delta Amex card). One in particular, the earning of Medallion Qualifying Dollars, is interesting in that it heaps on more complexity to an already complex program.
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It actually made some improvements to the program (unless you like flying on Alaska). But yesterday, Delta did something strange. Delta has been getting a lot of bad press lately regarding changes to its SkyMiles frequent flier program (including right here on the blog).