hi! im 3 days old on Flyertalk and I hope to find some clarification from a veteran. i have DL GM that I guess im losing for 2014. (about 16,000 mqm short and 12 mqs). i didnt understand how it worked till i joined FT last week! (my bad). my questions are.....when im looking for MRs here i havent seen anything from (or even including) ATL, my connection airport (home is CHA which i usually originate and terminate). does this mean ATL never has good deals? also, ive noticed people actually build in MRs throughout the year. do I earn anything towards my status if i use SM for MR? i have >200k SM. should i continue to save them for vacations? sorry this is long but i want desperately to understand how this works to my best benefit.
thanks!!! already addicted to FT! lol

Welcome to FlyerTalk!

Your post is a great example of something I've long suspected...a good portion (maybe even a majority?) of airline elites don't really know how it all works...they just know "if I fly airline X enough, I get some benefits and maybe an upgrade." So a personal thank you from me for validating my theory! But hopefully as you read and ask questions around the FlyerTalk forums, you'll educate yourself on how it all works and go into next year knowing what to do and how to do it to get and maximize the benefits of your status. ^

I don't know a lot about the ATL market, but ATL is a huge fortress hub for DL, so DL can compete on a lot of factors (schedule, nonstop routes, etc.) without needing to compete on price, so it's possible they don't publish many good fares beginning/ending in ATL. A skim of the fares in the Mileage Run Deals forum (and archived fares in the Mileage Run Discussion forum) may give you some ideas on whether anything good ever shows up out of ATL. CHA is not nearly as dominated by DL, so DL has to compete on price there and probably files better deals than they do out of ATL.

Also, unfortunately, mileage redemption tickets don't qualify for MQM (you need 50,000 MQM per year to qualify for DL GM). There might be some threads in the Delta forum with ideas on how to earn MQM without flying, but I think it'll probably be pretty challenging to earn 16,000 of them (especially at an affordable cost) without flying.

You can buy up to 10,000 MQMs this month if you're willing to pay the price that DL is asking this year. You can also get a few MQMs from Hilton stays, although I'm not sure when this promo ends. Otherwise, you can either fly to earn the MQMs before the end of the year or take about 9,000 MQMs rollover and work on getting better than FO status next year. However, starting next year, DL is also imposing MQD requirements (money spent on DL where not everything counts) for all status levels.