Delta and Amex can't seem to do simple addition
 

I love this offer that Delta keeps sending me and that Amex has on their website:

STEP 3: YOU EARN
You can earn 10,000 bonus miles for each approved referral, up to 55,000 bonus miles per calendar year.1

Also wrong in the footnote.
Guess I am not surprised.

Thanks for posting!

where's the error?

How is this wrong? Maybe you earn 10k for the first 5 and only 5k for the 6th one.

10k per referral is the offer. There is no way to get to 55K

Except that "up to" modifies 10k. You *would* get 10k for the 6th one, but the 55k cap cuts in.

There are plenty of DL glitches/IT/rules quirks etc. to complain about without going out of your way to manufacture one.

And certainly no need for snark. It makes zero sense to suggest there is a "cap" - there isnt one mentioned anywhere. Why not simply call it up to 60K and call it a day.

My previous response wasn't intended snark (I can't promise the same about this one)

:confused: you mean, other than where it mentions "up to 55,000"?

Well sure, I agree with that and if you'd written this to begin with you probably would've gotten less pushback, but you said "can't seem to do simple addition." If they'd said "earn 10k = 10k for a total of 25k!" you might have a point, but that's different than "why isn't the limit on max earn an exact multiple of the individual bonus amount".

So IMO it was ironically your own attempt to be cute and snarky that backfired on you. Not that you will or should care what I think :)

My CC limit is $25k. I guess I can't go out and make $10k transactions.

I had noticed the 10K/55K email a while back. I thought it was sort of dumb. But then, I also can't imagine bugging six of my friends and relatives to sign up for a card, so the chances of me hitting that 10K - 5K mismatch are functionally zero.

You'd probably hafto bug 20 or 30 friends to get 6 to say yes to get the 6th bonus of 5K to kick in, anyway!

;)

55k is Amex's limit on other offers too. If I refer people to a Platinum card I get 15k, 15k, 15k, 10k.

Exactly.

"We will give you free glasses of beer until the keg runs dry"
So because the last glass isn't full they can't do math?
Hardly.

All this offer says is you get 10k miles per referral, however they won't give you more than 55k in bonus miles per year. Refer as many people as you want, no more than 55k.

1 person = 10k total
2 people = 20k total
...
5 people = 50k total
6 people = 55k total
7 people = 55k total
1 million people = you guessed it 55k total.

Not like they would stop you from referring people, they just stop giving you free miles.

I would argue the opposite they have a legal and accounting teams that did the math, told advertising no more than 55k bonus per cardholder per promotion. They know how many cardholders they have they did the math to figure the risk. Advertising probably did the math and said 5k per referral isn't enough to illicit action. Let's go with 10k per referral, then they did the math again and figured (like other posters have commented) that most people probably would not end up referring more than a few anyway based on how many people you would need to bother to actually get some to sign up.

If someone generated 1 million referrals, they'd be receiving either some kind of search warrant or a job offer. :D