Friend Purchasing Ticket
 

Hello. If my friend was to purchase a delta ticket for me through their own account, will this ticket show up on my account skymiles or no? Will there be any evidence of this activity when you log in through my account?

If they put your skymiles number on the ticket when they purchase it, then yes it will show up in your account.
Otherwise it won't show up anywhere unless you do a search by name with the booking record number.

So I don't need a skymiles number to have a ticket with delta? If they were to purchase my ticket without this I would just be losing the skymiles I could collect for a future flight?

No, you don't need a number. But, if you want it to show in your account you already have a number and should use it. Whenever I put multiple tickets on the same itinerary, I always add everyone's individual SM number so that they get credit.

If it is a surprise ticket that I don't want them to see on their account. Can I just eat the skymiles and purchase the ticket anyways?

The sky miles number can always be added later.

So yes, make the purchase, leave off the number.

You ask about your friend purchasing you a ticket from their account. If they are paying in cash, there is no impact or point of the purchasing party having logged in into their account. Once the ticket is purchased, they'll get a record locator and other details of the ticket. If they add your skymiles number, it will show up under your account when you log in. If they didn't add your skymiles number, you won't see any details of the ticket in your account. As others have pointed out, you can search for the ticket but you'll need an additional piece of information to find it (record locator, ticket number, or credit card number used to purchase the ticket).

If on the other hand, your friend is purchasing your ticket using DL skymiles (i.e., purchasing an award ticket), they will have to log in into their account in order to complete the purchase. As noted above, they'll have to add your skymiles number for the ticket to show up in your account as noted above. The other thing to note is that you won't receive any skymiles from this trip since award tickets do not earn miles. You will, however, have the associated benefits of your skymiles membership so it would still make sense to add your skymiles number to the record.

If the friend is purchasing the ticket from DL with a credit card, be aware that there's a possibility (depending on the route, with certain international routes considered high risk) of needing to show the credit card that was used for the purchase to DL at check in, with a possibility of the person who owns the credit card doing this in advance at the airport (or a DL ticket office, if any still exist). AFAIK this might also apply if a credit card is used to pay the taxes and fees on an award ticket, again depending very much on the route. Most airlines do this an an anti-fraud device.

Something doesn't add up here - "A friend is buying you a ticket, but it's a surprise and you don't want it to show up in their account"? The fact that they are buying you a ticket is a surprise? To them?

That doesn't sound sketchy at all...

Here is the thing about that. They have to have another way if this comes up. For years, I paid for tickets with a card I didn't physically have. Dozens and dozens of times I have given my SkyMiles to other people with me not traveling always paying the taxes and fees myself. Number of times they have been asked to show the card....zero. If they had been, they are going to say they don't have it. Maybe Delta calls me. Maybe they ask some other questions. This is not an unusual situation. It has to come up.

I think it’s HIGHLY unlikely unless the ticket is purchased from a location with high incidents of credit card fraud. Think maybe parts of Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. Like if you’re buying the ticket in the US it’s not something I would give any thought to.

The two regions that seem to generate that kind of fraud concern are western Africa (Nigeria and Ghana airports are big red flags in the system) and, for some reason, the US Virgin Island airports. The usual workaround is to purchase through a third party online travel agency like Expedia.

My parents like to pay for the tickets when we go up to visit and I've never had an issue. Even have Mom's Delta credit card number saved into my own Skymiles account. If there ever was a question, it would be pretty easy to verify that, yes, I make regular trips to the city identified as her hometown in her Skymiles account using that card and and even have her listed as my emergency contact person in my Skymiles account. So enough connection points that the odds that there is ticket fraud with that purchase are close to zero.

You are missing the point. To the customer, there wouldn't be anything to know to work around. Delta has to have a plan in place when they think they want the credit card for fraud purposes and the customer doesn't have it. Maybe they are good enough to figure out when it really is a fraud. But I am betting their success rate is less than 100%.

100% protection from fraud causes too many problems with legitimate ticket purchases so the system in place is designed to filter out higher risk actions and I believe if you try to buy a ticket to Lagos directly on Delta’s web site you are the. Informed of the card match requirement

I've purchased tickets for others to USVI plenty of times and never had an issue. The only ones I'm aware of in the caribbean that people sometimes get the cc check is to jamacia or dominican republic.