MQD tracking and projecting
 

Good morning all, I'm a long time flyer with Delta, new to this forum. I've been frustrated for a long time at the minimal features on Delta's site for tracking MQD accumulation and projecting what credit card spending we need to hit and/or card benefits we need to use to hit status thresholds. I have an Excel tracker which works well but is clunky and requires parsing the PDF provided by Delta (why can't transactions be exported in csv?!)

Curious whether this is a shared frustration? And what solutions people have employed?

Thanks!

There are a number of existing threads on this topic. MQDs post to account a day or two after transactions occur and they can group together multiple transactions together in one post. Since they don't post fractional MQD amounts, they always just round-up. So if you spend $51 over the course of a day or two on an DL Amex Reserve, it will be rounded up to 6 MQDs in the post. There's not much point in trying to track individual transactions since they don't post to account one-to-one. The annual fee does not count towards MQDs (nor Skymiles earning). Amex transactions occuring during the current calendar year will count towards current year MQD totals even if they post in the following year. Transactions have both an "Activity" date and a "Posted" date and the "Activity" date is used to determine which year the MQDs count towards.

Thanks for your reply. And I appreciate all that info. My frustration is additional to the points you've made. It's about having a place to project MQD accumulation of credit card spending, choice benefits, and unbooked flights during the rest of the year on reaching status thresholds.

Well, I guess I don't really understand then. Future credit card MQD earn will simply be slightly more (due to round-up method) than spend/10 or spend/20 depending on credit card. The round-up method will just add a few 10's of dollars to MQD earnings, so you can basically just not include them in calculations. They do show a pending MQD earn from flights booked on delta.com (although this does not include future DL Vacations bookings MQD earn or Delta Stays promo MQDs). You can calculate future earn from Delta flights yourself pretty easily from the base fare amount before taxes and fees (again they round up to nearest whole dollar). This is demonstrated below where $598.14 base fare earns $599 MQDs. Partner coded flights (generally, these will only be booked on partner sites or third-party sites) will be more challenging as those earn MQD as a percentage of mileage flown and you need to use the partner mileage earnings charts to calculate those -- https://www.delta.com/us/en/skymiles...rline-partners You'll also need to use a mileage calculator to get mileage amount for flights. http://www.gcmap.com works well enough.

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...0e733c2b89.png
https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...f184ccc90a.png

I guess I’ll say that I don’t really have this as a concern. The projection is “fine” for DL flights as long as there isn’t a ticket exchange. As xliioper mentions above, CC spend posts pretty quickly. Not sure why I would need to project that to that great of detail. I’m not earning $28001 MQD… even if I were close, I wouldn’t “risk” being that close on something I care about. There is no reward for making the exact minimum.

There's also no reward for exceeding the minimum. :D

But I agree with your sentiment. I'm not sure I understand the complaint/concern here. And while DL does project out future flights, I don't know how DL would project one's future CC spend. DL does show how short you are of the next threshold based on current projections. If you're projected 500 MQDs short of the next threshold, that means you need to A) book 500 MQDs worth of flights (probably $550-$600 in actual flight spend), B) Spend $5,000 or $10,000 on your Reserve or DL Plat AmEx (respectively), or C) achieve a scaling combination of the two. Not sure why DL needs to be involved in the math here though other than saying "You're 500 MQDs short" which again, DL does do already.

I gifted my spouse and kid 18 months of PM each for hitting 50k MQD under “Beyond Diamond” last summer.

My retired parents each got PM the same way. Nice way to pay them back for all the SM award trips for interviews that they gave me in the past.

What I was implying was there’s basically no difference in meeting versus exceeding the thresholds until you reach the next one. If you get 5000 MQDs or you get 9999 MQDs, you’re still Silver. 10,000 to 14,999 gets you GM, and so on. That was my point. ;)

Right.
With the good old MQMs, one could at least take advantage of having the exceeding portion transferred into the following year.

For me, it is also demotivating.
Result? I do not plan to chase the status beyond Jan 2028.

I'm a big fan of tracking things automatically in Excel, but a first order analysis should be sufficient. You should be able to forecast your travel schedule (mine averages twice a month SLC-BOS at $800/trip) and adjust your card spending to match (mine is $75k to get the club access). For me, that yields 29k MQD with no other hoops to jump through. If I were projecting not making DM around September, I'd keep spending on the card past $75k.

If you really want to automate it, AMEX lets you export your transactions as a .csv, and then you'd just have to hand jam your flights. You could use that data to project the rest of the year.

Concur. Once you hit 28001 MQD and $75k on the card for lounge access, there's no reason to put another dollar on the card. I think it's funny that the non-Delta AMEX earns miles on literally everything, including Delta flights, than the Delta AMEX.

I’ve been having Claude Code build a parser for delta’s PDF download (www only) to then compare vs past ones. It’s not perfect, would be way easier if there was a CSV download for sure!