@WindyCityDeac what kind of travel are you going to be doing? Mostly relatively inexpensive $350 flights or more expensive long haul or transatlantic stuff? The sweet spot for getting a Delta Platinum or Reserve card if you aren’t in a captive hub like ATL or SLC, IMO, is if your flight spend will get you close to a status level, but not quite there. Like if you expect to spend, say $7000, on flights, then you could get another $2500 MQDs with the head start bonus for the card and if you bought all the flights with the card and nothing else, you’d have another $700 MQDs from CC spend with the Reserve and will hit the $10,000 MQDs for gold medallion, as opposed to being silver if you just spent the $7000.
Next year, I think a lot of true road warriors will drop status level, if most of their flights are relatively inexpensive short haul flights (but a lot of those folks also probably had a glut of rollover MQMs and will be able to extend their status for a year or more with the conversion). On the other hand, if you travel internationally only 2 or 3 times a year and are allowed to book premium select or delta 1, you’re going to hit platinum pretty easily.
