What about a combination of the two? United's got their status match program listed on their website. You could start out by staying with DL, and continue until you hit PM. Then do a status challenge with United to Premier Platinum. If you qualify for the United challenge on or after July 1, then you will get status for the rest of this year and all of next year.

This way you start out as DL gold and fly with those benefits for a while. Then you'll get to start out at Prem Plat on your first flight with United, and only need 25k miles to keep the status through Jan 2014. This way you get to experience Prem Plat on United before committing 75k EQM's to get there.


http://pss.united.com/web/en-US/apps...omoCode=TB8230