A couple of years ago, Delta announced huge increases to elite status requirements before member backlash caused them to largely backtrack on that. Ever since, we’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it has recently been confirmed by View from the Wing that Delta will not increase elite status requirements in 2026. That’s great news for Delta loyalists.
As View from the Wing points out, when backtacking on the announced changes in 2023, Delta leadership indicated that their mistake was in moving too quickly. In a sense, they said that they thought they were removing the bandaid quickly, making a single set of changes that would likely remain unchanged for years rather than needing to announce a series of annual increases, inching toward where they intended to end up.
Based on those comments, I think most who follow these things expected that we would see annual moderate changes in Delta elite status requirements or a reduction in how generous they were with anciliary ways of offering reduces paths toward elite status. For instance, it is possible to get some level of Delta elite status entirely from annual credit card boosts.
I suspect that Delta has figured out what I’ve previously guessed American has: handing out “easy” elite status to people who aren’t regularly flying increases loyalty among a group who aren’t going to put much strain on the benefits (it doesn’t cost much to offer elite benefits to people who rarely fly and therefore rarely use those benefits), but it exponentially increases the odds that the airline can capture revenue from those passengers on the rare instance that they choose to fly. In other words, my guess is that Joe Leisure Traveler flies once or twice a year and if he’s earning elite status on Delta from the sofa, all the more chance that he will choose to fly Delta during those one or two trips per year (probably even starting his search at Delta.com) rather than choosing based on price. I could be wrong, but that doesn’t seem like a terrible strategy to me.
Regardless of whether I’m right about why they aren’t changing status requirements, it is great to see that we haven’t yet seen Delta creep higher with requirements in the years since 2023, and it is great to now know that they will not start ascending toward higher elite status requirements in 2026.
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(crickets chirping)