Delta and American Express: break-even changes to break-even cards
/If you have a Delta co-branded American Express card, then you might have gotten an e-mail or read elsewhere (Frequent Miler, Danny Deal Guru, Doctor of Credit) about increases to the annual fee and changes to some of the cards’ other benefits.
I’ve had the Platinum Business version for years now, and Delta is still my favorite domestic airline to fly, but I haven’t had any strong feelings about it since I drastically reduced my Delta flying and stopped pursuing their Medallion elite status. Since the card had a $250 annual fee, my only goal was to use the companion ticket for a flight that cost at least that much, so I wouldn’t just be throwing the money away.
Fortunately, Delta has nonstop flights from my preferred local airport to Madison, Wisconsin, and Lexington, KY, so I’m able to use the companion ticket almost every year to visit friends there.
The annual fee on the Platinum personal and business cards is going up to $350 per year, and the Reserve personal and business cards will cost $650, in both cases on your first cardmember anniversary after May 1, 2024 (the higher annual fees are already in effect for new applicants). Even taking the increased annual fee into account, the value proposition of the card after this month’s changes has actually moved slightly in my favor. Here are the major changes and my impressions of them.
Improved companion ticket
The most attention has rightly been paid to the improved companion ticket, which now can be used for flights from the continental United States to “Hawaii, Alaska, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America.” Platinum companion tickets can only be used for economy, while the Reserve tickets can be used to book first class (but not Delta One, the even fancier first class cabin).
As I mentioned, I’m not inclined to use a Delta companion ticket for domestic connections if a non-stop flight is available on another carrier. Since my preferred local airport doesn’t have international flights, when traveling abroad a connection or a worse airport is a given, so expanding the number of destinations makes me much more likely to successfully use the ticket each year.
Note that “success” in this case depends not just on your destination and the price of the ticket (at least $350 before taxes and fees), but on the eligible fare classes. While more destinations are eligible for the ticket, the same (L, U, T, X, and V) economy fare classes have to be available, which can deeply constrain your options, especially during more popular windows for air travel.
Rideshare credits
The updated Platinum and Reserve cards now have a $10 per calendar month rideshare credit. Ordinarily I’d consider this a distracting gimmick, but I happen to have a specific use for these credits: I have a $5 per month subscription to Lyft’s “community pass,” which gives me unlimited access to free 30-minute dockless scooter rides.
I switched my recurring payment over to my Delta Platinum card and can already confirm it triggers the rideshare credit. When I occasionally trigger small overage fees for rides over 30 minutes, the credits also pay for those, although that’s worth less than face value to me since I would be more vigilant about ending my rides on time if I didn’t have the credits to cover them.
Since this is a “real” expense I’m currently paying with cash, I consider this $60 per year to be worth a full $60 to me.
Who or what is an “eligible Resy purchase?”
Another statement credit added to the cards is a $10 (Platinum personal and business) or $20 (Reserve personal and business) monthly credit for “eligible Resy purchases.” Since I’d never heard of Resy, I hopped over to their website to see what they sold and whether I wanted any of it.
In case you’re as clueless as I was, it turns out to be a restaurant reservation management platform owned by American Express. Discovering this didn’t shed much light on the situation: I still needed to know what a “Resy purchase” was and what would make it “eligible.” Would I need to make a reservation? Is there such a thing as a prepaid restaurant reservation?
Fortunately, it turns out virtually every restaurant I could think of is on the Resy platform, so I headed to a cool café nearby to see what the deal was. They sell gift cards, so I bought $10 worth and waited. Two days later, I received an e-mail from American Express that I’d earned a Resy credit, and it has already posted to my account (the credit is backdated to the day of the purchase so I’m not sure when it actually appeared on my transaction record).
Given my experience, I believe the credit is applied by American Express based on their own record of participating Resy restaurants and not by the restaurant processing the transaction in a specifically “Resy way” (the payment terminal was “toast”-branded, a popular restaurant point-of-sale system in my city).
The gift card I bought is reloadable, so my current plan is simply to load another $10 to it on the first of each month. I don’t value the credit at a full $120 (since I have never and would never spend $10 a month at this café), but it’s certainly worth something.
Prepaid Delta Stays, large-transaction and high-spend bonuses
There are a few more odds and ends on the cards that you should be aware of but won’t be relevant to everyone.
All the Delta co-branded American Express cards cards have an annual Delta Stays credit of between $100 (Gold personal) and $250 (Reserve Business). Delta Stays is powered by Expedia and appears to have the same prices you’d find booking directly through Expedia or Hotels.com. I often use Hotels.com to book paid stays on non-chain properties, so I’m very likely to use my entire $200 credit each year.
The Platinum Business card is unique (Doctor of Credit incorrectly says that the Reserve Business has this feature as well) in offering 1.5 SkyMiles per dollar on otherwise-unbonused (i.e., excluding “transit,” “U.S. shipping,” “Delta flights,” and “hotels”) individual transactions over $5,000, on up to $100,000 in such purchases per year.
Finally, the Platinum and Reserve cards give you 2,500 Medallion Qualifying Dollars at the beginning of each year, and you can earn 1 Medallion Qualifying dollar for every $20 (Platinum) or $10 (Reserve) spent with the card.
The last two benefits create an interesting opportunity and tradeoff. The Platinum Business card alone allows you to spend $50,000 per year in transactions of $5,000 or more to earn 75,000 SkyMiles and Silver Medallion status, while the Reserve cards allow you to earn 25,000 Skymiles and Silver Medallion status with $25,000 in spend (in transactions of any size) or 75,000 SkyMiles and Gold Medallion status with $75,000 in spend.
I don’t think either of these are particularly good value propositions in a vacuum, since I don’t think either Medallion status or SkyMiles are very valuable anymore, but it’s worth mentioning if you need to top up your MQD’s to reach the next Medallion tier: doing so in $5,000 or larger transactions on the Platinum Business card improves the value by giving you 50% more redeemable SkyMiles.
Conclusion
You can see why I view these changes as modest improvements to a set of cards that were already pretty unremarkable. After deducting the $60 in cash-like rideshare credits, I’ll be paying $290 for:
a slightly-improved economy companion ticket;
$120 in café gift cards;
and $200 in prepaid hotel stays.
That’s not a card I’d move to the top of my applications pile on its own, but it’s a card I’m fine keeping for another year. There are currently signup bonuses of 100,000 SkyMiles for the Platinum Business and 110,000 SkyMiles for the Reserve Business, which might make one of those worth signing up for if you already have a valuable use for the miles in mind. Since the companion ticket is only awarded after the first anniversary, you do have to hold onto the card for at least a year to even begin to get value out of your annual fee, which is not waived for the first year on any of the cards.
