Diamond was introduced and earned in 2009. The first year for DM to be in effect was 2010. BTW, they gave out “Charter” tags in 2010 and 2011

On recent flights ex-AMS I have seen 360 tags multiple times. I think on my most recent flight at least two passengers in D1 had the 360 tags. Now this doesn’t mean they are current, but was surprised by how many I’ve seen.

Won’t lie, being a top 5% (per Delta email haha) flier from ATW kind of hoping for the invite but not expecting since I won’t hit 40K mqd this year. Also, as discussed not much appreciable difference, but any little bit can help. Overall though, happy as a DM.

Delta 360 membership runs through end of January.

For 2018 I got the email Feb 1st. For 2017 I got the email Feb 18th.

I think their last minute communication is indicative of the fact that this is a stepchild program which isn’t well developed. Most Delta employees still don’t know what 360 is and don’t treat you any differently. They don’t have day to day benefits like early boarding.

That seems very reasonable, but might not be consistent with the "evidence" contained in the DL Milestones email link that was distributed today and is being discussed in another thread currently. Lots of the "winners" were DMs, but there's only one where the writeup mentions 360 and that's Julian P., longest distance at 473,267 miles flown. It says that he earned a million RDMs this year and if I try very loosely to guesstimate his spend, I get about $70K (assuming 13 miles per dollar for a DM with the Reserve card and also assuming that he got about 100,000 miles without flying, either from Reserve card bonuses, crosscutting (RIP) miles, etc.) In fact, 900,000 RDMs / 13 RDMs per mile = $69,231 spend (or MQDs). His writeup emphasizes flights to Hawaii, so I'm implicitly assuming that this is all DL metal. I'm also assuming that he's not doing manufactured spending on DL AmEx cards as I don't think he would have the time for that.

Approximately $70K spend would probably be enough for 360 at an outstation but not a hub, although given the distance flown, it doesn't look like expensive tickets were generally used. Again doing a rough calculation, if all of these flights earned MQMs at 100%, it appears that he's paying about 14.6 cents per MQM (or mile flown), which isn't super cheap but it's not a high rate of spend either. It's just a bit about what the DM MQD requirement would suggest, $15,000/125,000 MQMs = 12 cents per MQM on average, although of course the rate would be higher with Reserve card MQMs or rollover MQMs.

Indeed, if we hypothesize that a typical 360 might earn 150,000-200,000 MQMs and spend $50,000-$100,000 (where the $50,000 is believed not to be enough at hubs and where we're obviously attempting to eliminate extremely high mileage or extremely high spending), we would get a range of $50,000/200,000 = 25 cents per MQM to $100,000/150,000 = 67 cents per MQM, so this guy's MQM versus spend wouldn't look so good to DL.

Alternatively, he supposedly flew 50 red eye segments last year, so we know he flew at least 50 segments and in fact the number must be much higher because 473,267 miles/50 segments = 9,465 miles per segment which is beyond the range of most aircraft and if he likes Hawaii so much, he can't always be traveling to Australia or South Africa. If he had the sort of travel patterns to qualify on segments, we'd be looking at close to 1,000 segments per year, which would be about $70 per segment on average, clearly impossible. OTOH, if the redeyes are half of his flying (which is still unlikely from the Midwest), then we'd have $700 per segment, which again doesn't seem that impressive by 360 standards, even if we believe the average segment approached 5,000 miles, which is also almost impossible from the Midwest, where longhaul international flying would involve (from a nonhub) at least one domestic segment for every long international one, so we might guess that a typical RT could have two 1,000 mile domestic segments and two 5,000 mile international segments, for an average segment length of 3,000, which would imply 158 segments per year (not even the MQS requirement for DM) or about $70,000/158 = $443 per segment, again not a huge number for a 360, although I don't often think of nplane tickets in terms of cost per segment, so my perceptions of what is typical could be way off.