leftarmcomedy

Hey friends. I am brand new and looking to do some milage runs on Delta to move from Plat to Dia this year. I have some buddy passes so can start in ANY city and I'm open on dates thru 2016. Appreciate any help or advice. Thanks!

Zorak

Welcome to FlyerTalk! It sounds like you're pretty flexible. Given that one thing I'd start with is scan the Mileage Run Deals and depending on your tolerances the Premium Fare Deals forums for recentish stuff with things like DL, AF, KL, ST in the titles. Some of those recur and/or can be found on an ongoing basis even if the thread isn't necessarily active. (If you do it by search vs. a visual scan, note that FT search is somewhat enigmatic; in this case I'd switch to the advanced search mode, do a title-only search, and put short words like "dl" in quotation marks otherwise it will ignore them)

The thread below is a pretty well known run and you can get 24-25K MQMs in one shot

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/mile...i-4-9-cpm.html

Other general advice: read a lot, ask questions, glance at the partner airline earning charts if you consider international travel, become comfortable with Google Flights and ITA Matrix, etc.

PayItForward

Moving from Plat to Diamond takes (at extreme) 50,000 miles. That is easily at least 2 long haul international itinerary you are looking at.

The more common one that nets you between 21,000 - 25,000 MQM (in Y) is US-SIN.

Check out this thread
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/milea...l#post26687284

BHammy

My wife and I both just did this last year after sitting at platinum for several years.

DL Amex Platinum- I think it gets you 5k MQMs after the first $1k spend, then another 10K MQMs after $25K spend
And at the $25K spend, your MQDs get waived.

For both my wife and I, we barely clear Platinum spend, but both hitting $25k gets us a pass and the bonus MQMs. Although we're not getting the initial bonus 5K this year, we're both pushing past $50K on each card to get us another 10K MQM (20K total)
And we just used our companion certs to help get our family across country that are 'free' every year.

Go for the Reserve card and get more MQM bonus as well as FC companion cert.

Beyond that, don't expect many runs out of ATL. I'm based in Chat, hop thru ATL nearly every time and have been watching for deals for about the past year.

I think the best option will be repositioning - look for a great MR, then buy a ticket to get to that originating city (or add it to that MR fare). I did this last Dec: added CHA-ATL-LAX to the MR: LAX-MSP-ANC-MSP-LAX. Got about 13K MQMs for the run at 4cpm (and spent two nights in ANC to see the Northern Lights!)

Good luck!

dinanm3atl

It seems that DL has way less MRs than the other. Simply based on the other threads.

Then of course DL seems to have the US->SIN at ~25K all the time.

audidudi

I have a question for a friend who wants to do a pay-with-miles mileage run from SEA>ICN>SEA. He wants to fly back on the same day he arrives and wants to know when he arrives at ICN, does he follow the signs for Transfer Passengers and then check-in for the ICN>SEA flight at a DL/SkyTeam desk somewhere? Thanks for any help with this one!

MSPeconomist

AFAIK buddy pass travel is all standby, so it's way too risky to use this to position for a trip. On the way home it could work if you don't mind getting stuck somewhere for days and spending money for hotel rooms and meals. This assumes that you can get a decent one way purchased fare from your home airport to the departure point for your "MR" ticket.

dinanm3atl

Enjoy - https://www.kayak.com/flights/LAX-AT...LAX/2016-11-10

Few members doing this(connecting through DTW).