This morning, it occurred to me that I might not have picked all of my 2025 Delta Choice Benefits yet. We only have through January 31, 2026, to make the selection. My wife and I each have Diamond status, and I discovered that we had each only selected one of our three Choice Benefits so far. I had previously selected the $700 Statement Credit for Delta Platinum & Reserve cardholders for myself, so for my other two picks, I chose 35,000 miles each, for a total of 70,000 miles. My wife had previously selected Global Upgrade certificates, so I selected the $700 statement credit and 35,000 miles for her final two benefits. That’s a ton of value we would have missed out on if I had forgotten to make our selections!
Use the mobile app
Delta’s desktop website didn’t seem to be working this morning for selecting Choice Benefits, so I logged in to our Delta accounts on the Delta mobile app instead. From there, simply click on Account and scroll down to find a link to Choice Benefits. The link itself showed that we had benefits available to select. After clicking through, it was easy to pick our benefits.
Don’t pick upgrade certificates, elite status, or SkyClub membership!
If you pick from your 2025 Choice Benefits, each of these benefits is valid only through tomorrow (January 31, 2026). It would be a huge waste to pick any of these!
If you have 2026 Choice Benefits available, though, these are fine choices because they will be valid through January 31, 2027.
What to choose?
This is easy. For your 2025 selections, I recommend (in priority order):
- Statement credit for Delta Platinum & Reserve cardholders
- Platinum Choice Benefit: $400
- Diamond Choice Benefit: $700
- Bonus miles (if you have multiple selections available, you can pick this multiple times)
- Platinum Choice Benefit: 30,000 miles
- Diamond Choice Benefit: 35,000 miles
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Why didn’t you both select 4 GUCs? This is undoubtedly the most valuable benefit!
These were benefits for 2025 so the GUCs would have expired January 31, 2026. The SkyMiles do not, while the statement credit effectively makes the Delta Reserve free. For 2026, no doubt Greg and his wife are picking GUCs first though!
Do you mean why did my wife pick the GUCs in 2025 and I didn’t? The reason is that I waited for a good opportunity to use them before picking them. That opportunity never came up this past year for me.
Had now clue that some Loyalty elite status still had some really world value.
Actually been shocked that simply holding DBP ( DL biz plat) has gotten us uprgades on half our flights this past year maybe 4-5x times but even to domestic F (and so odd issue on a half full plane (including F/PE) I was upgraded to F but not P2 (gave us 40K SM – which was almost half the SM to SXM (St. Maarten) from PDX last Sunday – was booked – PDX-MIA-SXM on AA and back-up UA PDX-EWR-SXM (canceled and auto rebooked multiple times becasue of the Polar Vortex that hit the US.
Our AA flight to Maimi (the plane was delayed at DFW (ice/snow) found DL had a flight PDX-ATL-SXM that left four later and had 3 open seats left. Plane had been at PDX since night before (flightaware) – so almost 0 chances of crew timing out.
90K DL SM for 1W last minute flight vs 4 Hilton award nights with 30 day cancelations windows and no-show penalties (almost $10K wirh taxes fees – plus nothing else planned for our Aspire Resort credits – the FNC all expire in next 2-3 daya in February.
So happy to have FF miles for backup and last minute bookings – would have paid the $1.1K cash price if needed – to avoid no-show penalties.
That said also upgraded on DL ATL-SXM (we typically are the very bottom of all stand-by/upgrade lists) but the DL 757 was only half full (probably from people stuck at other airports from delay/cancelations.
But the DBP (Amex) has soild value for us -the free checked bags this and last year covered much of AF – the $120 Resy/Uber Credits (gravy) same with annual $200 Delta stays (hotel credit). P2 got the DBG (biz gold) last summer and I only have 1K SM left -so will likely downgrade/or close and PC P2 to DBP after 1st AF posts.
I think choosing the $2000MQD boost is more valuable than 100,000 SkyPennies
Oof. No. Not at all. Go with the SkyPesos, regardless.
Choosing the MQD Accelerator this late in the game only has value if you were within 2K MQDs of the next status level by the end of 2025. It applies to 2026 status which you’ve already earned.
They did away with chosing the benefits on your desktop, the way way to choose them now is in the app.
Dude, you just saved (earned) me $400. Thanks!
It’s also Amex Platinum Airline Credit choice time… forgot about that one until yesterday!
Why not… United Travel Bank instead? Or an AA gift card! *wink*
Hope that 1 year Travel Bank expiration is just a glitch!