Delta is offering a 100% bonus on purchased miles when paying for the transaction with a Delta co-branded American Express card.
The offer runs through the end of the month, and is only open to primary Delta Amex accountholders. You can purchase between 2000 and 60,000 miles under the offer.
I had seen the offer a couple of weeks ago. But the interesting thing that finally prompted me to post it is a comment from Steve yesterday that the Flyertalk thread on the offer was pretty moribund. As of this writing there’s a whopping 10 posts in the thread.
That’s in stark contrast to the huge excitement generated by the persistent US Airways 100% bonus on purchased miles.
And the difference in excitement levels is hardly that US Airways doesn’t require use of their co-branded credit card to qualify!
It’s an interesting market reaction, an illustration of the relative value of the miles you’d be buying under each offer. With Delta ‘Skypesos’ you do have the chance to purchase Air France business class award seats to Europe, for sure, and doing so with miles under this offer is much cheaper than buying the tickets outright. And you can buy V Australia business class seats from the US to Australia this way as well, subject to availability. But beyond that the options are pretty limited.
US Airways, on the other hand, gets you access to awards throughout Star Alliance where availability is much much better, such as business class on Lufthansa, on All Nippon, and on Thai.
Frugal Travel Guy blogs the offer the morning and comments that it’s good for ‘topping off an account’ and sure — if you’re working towards an award already this will help get you there faster.
IMO this has more to do with the fact that I just don’t want to buy miles than it does with Delta’s limitations or the use of my Skymiles card to do it…
Just ignore that bothersome ‘steve’ character.
Hasn’t DL promised to do something about their horrendous award search mechanism?
I can often find what I want with enough of the hoop jumping but then I remember I have *A miles to burn and can actually go in F, not just C/J. Silly DL.
I have opted for the 125K DL miles via SunTrust, and coupled with the 150K or so useless miles I do have I’ll hope to use them on V Australia in the next year or so. Or maybe it’s finally time I check out Vietnam since I was every interested way back in high school.
Can I purchase miles for someone else using my DL Amex and have them get the 100% bonus miles?
Maybe someday Delta will “get it” that the masses discovered how little value Delta skypesos have. I think that day won’t arrive until AmEx makes the first move on them.