Hello,

Is there someone who can explain in very simple words how the skymiles of delta are working?
My family and I are members since a year and a half. We are flying twice a year to europe. My husband has more than 50.000 miles and is still silver. The kids and I earned 37000 miles and have no status.
Some questions:
- how do one become silver or gold? Is that only when the miles are earned within a year?
- Do you loose your silver status if you don't have more than 25000 miles a year?
- can we ever use this miles?
- Is there no way of using these miles as a family? Together we have more than 100.000 miles and paid for all these tickets.

Thx, Veerle

Welcome to FT!

The basics: Status is earned based on miles flown between 1 January and 31 December, plus certain bonuses offered by some of the DL AmEx cards. Thus, if you're not earning 25K Medallion Qualifying Miles with Delta during a calendar year, no status. If during 2011 you earn Silver Medallion status, it will be good for all of 2012 and through 28 February 2013.

For redeeming miles, it's harder, especially since you can't pool the miles without paying transfer fees. Do you and each of your kids have 37,000 miles? If so, everyone would have enough miles (theoretically) for a round trip within the US. If you let us know where you'd be flying from and where you might like to go using your miles, we might be able to give more specific advice. (Award tickets to Europe will start at 60K round trip, so it would take a couple more trips for everyone to have enough miles to book such a trip.)

37k miles? Is that your way of saying that DL really has very few 25k low level awards for domestic flights?

But seriously, even the 60k coach Europe ticket, low level can be difficult to find if you plan far ahead. Also, if you originate out of Europe, you often pay a huge fuel surcharge per ticket, which can make a "free" trip quite expensive.

DL is not the best FF plan for a normal person. I rarely fly on American Airlines, but prefer their miles for award flights. I booked a RT in First Class this morning with AA and partner Cathay Pacific. Found low level flights, with no problem, plus I can change the dates since the return was more than 330 days out, for free.

You can have 4,000,000 miles in your account and have no status at all.

The miles you have in your account do not give you elite status. That comes from a separate calculation of how much you actually fly (found in your account under "Earned" miles) . These are called MQM's (Medallion Qualifying Miles) and the miles in your account are called RDM's (Redeemable miles). The biggest mistake people make is thinking:

1. MQM are the number of miles in your account
2. MQM's (what elite status is based on) are spendable...they are not.

To gain status you need to track the MQMs not the total mile you may receive. MQM stands for medalion qualifying miles. Not all miles are MQM miles. So if ypu earn extra miles from bonuses, most credit card miles, hotel stay etc. they are not MQM, therefore you don't earn miles towards status. But they do count towards award status. One good thing is the miles don't have an experation date so it might take a while but you will eventually be able to use the miles. No family plan

So we could use the 37000 miles for a domestic flight, even if we don't have an elite status? We want to go to Denver (from Atlanta) in June.

Yes.

You really have two different balances on your account:
-Your SkyMiles balance never expires. These miles are redeemable for award tickets, but have zero bearing on your elite status.
-Your MQM (or Medallion Qualification Miles) balance is used to determine your elite status. If you accumulate enough MQMs throughout the year, you earn elite status. Your MQM balance resets to 0 at the start of every new year, though if you made it to elite status you will "roll over" anything extra. (For example, say you made Silver at 25,000 MQMs, but kept flying and ended the year at 30,000 MQMs. You would then roll over the extra 5,000 MQMs to the next year and have a bit of a head start on requalifying.) MQMs are not redeemable for anything, and are only used to determine your elite status.

It is possible to have lots of SkyMiles but not be elite if you fly just a little bit every year (not enough to earn Elite status before your MQM balance resets to 0 every January 1) or if all your SkyMiles come from credit cards.

Likewise, it is possible to be a high level elite with lots of MQMs (Platinum or Diamond) but have very few SkyMiles because you spent them all on award tickets.

Here's a great place to start educating yourself about the Delta SkyMiles Medallion program, and here's a great place to start learning how to use your SkyMiles to book Award Travel on Delta.