Delta Tries to Woo Wealthy Flyers With Rewards Program

For wealthy travelers, flying is reportedly no longer that important to Delta’s frequent flyer program.

The airline had kept its SkyMiles loyalty program linked to flying as its competitors chose a different path: rewarding travelers for spending with their credit cards, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday (Sept. 14).

Now, however, Delta is moving to a system that lets customers earn perks depending on how much they spend on travel, co-branded credit cards or by reserving hotels, rental cars and vacation packages through Delta outlets, the report said.

“We wanted to make the program more welcoming to customers,” Dwight James, senior vice president of customer engagement and loyalty at Delta, told the WSJ. “But we also want to ensure that we’re reserving the most premium experiences for our most premium customers.”

To become one of those customers, flyers will need to spend more, per the report. For now, Delta customers need to spend the equivalent of $3,000 on flights to reach the SkyMiles program’s entry-level Silver status.

But beginning in 2024, requirements based on the number of flights and the distance traveled won’t apply, but customers must spend $6,000 to reach Silver status. And travelers hoping to access SkyMiles upper-level status, Diamond, will need to spend $35,000 per year, the report said.

The reason for the change is frequent flyers have become less frequent. While travelers who collected points by routine flying may be scarce, the number of vacationers increased this summer, and they’ve shown they don’t mind spending to gain perks.

And they don’t mind spending with credit cards, as a joint PYMNTS and i2c study released this month found.

According to that study, 62% of consumers planned to travel during the summer, with 30% intending to travel more than the previous year. This interest was especially pronounced among younger generations, with more than 70% of Generation Z and millennial consumers saying they were interested in summer travel.

As for how they financed or planned to finance their trips, credit cards were the top payment method for leisure travel, with two-thirds of consumers using or planning to use credit cards to finance their summer travel expenses.

Credit card use rose with annual income, the study found, with nearly three-quarters of consumers earning over $100,000 using or planning to use credit cards for travel compared to 53% of those earning less than $50,000.