Delta 360 is the airline’s super-secret, invite-only status, but the only thing this special member’s club has done is encourage me to fly the airline less.
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I spend too much of my life crammed into the restrictive quarters of an airborne metal tube, ferrying myself across oceans and between continents. In a given year, I’ll tally up somewhere between 125 and 150 flights. It’s too many, but as a full-time traveler, I’m tethered by no home and no home base, neither belongings nor sense of belonging.
My loyalties are split between United’s Star Alliance and Delta’s SkyTeam—where I’ve been United 1K and Delta Diamond, respectively, since prior to the pandemic—all the better to ensure I can utilize the most convenient routes and give myself the best chance at superior seats and upgrade opportunities.
At the start of this year, I was at long last extended an invitation to join the elite Delta 360 program. It’s their exclusive invite-only status, not reachable by defined mileage or spending quotas, but rather, more ephemeral in nature. They choose to give you the nod. It’s bestowed upon you. I was thrilled. Yes, finally, it happened to me.
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Paraphrasing what Groucho Marx once said, though, I should have known that I wouldn’t want to be in any club that would accept me as a member. More than half a year later, I’m feeling less like a Delta Gold or Delta Platinum. Color me, instead, Delta Jaded.
Delta 360 Is a Failure of an Elite Program
For a solid three-month stretch this spring, the Delta 360 hotline was the most frequently dialed number in my phone. It’s not as if I were calling to chat. I was calling to vent. To air my grievances with those people, a la Festivus. To seek resolution. To demand satisfaction. I’m still waiting.
[T]he most coveted 360 perk is the opportunity to receive the occasional on-tarmac pickup in a Porsche… [but] the Porsches are really for people who pay into a separate program…
The Delta 360 program does little to distinguish itself from Delta Diamond, besides tantalizing with the promise of a hidden something more, an extra delight. Yet it almost never comes. You expect more, get the same, and end up disappointed as a result.
For instance, one of the most coveted 360 perks is the opportunity to receive the occasional on-tarmac pickup in a Porsche. When making a connection at one of Delta’s domestic hubs, you may be lucky enough to be greeted at the door of your plane and taken on a Porsche pleasure cruise to your next aircraft, bypassing the hustle and bustle of the terminal while arriving early and in style. Yet, after multiple tight-window connections, the Porsche was never offered. The truth was revealed on one of my many calls to the hotline: the Porsches are really for people who pay into a separate program, and it’s more of a fortuitous fluke if a 360 member receives the service. Despite it being dangled to you as a perk, don’t count on it.
Then there’s the preboarding. Or what used to be preboarding. And it’s less about being able to sit on the aircraft for an extra 37 minutes than it is about being able to signal to the other 189 passengers that you’re better than them. Though securing your allotted overhead bin space is nice, too.
But do you think that ever happens as it should? Here’s what I believe: Delta gate agents only make the announcement to preboard 360 members when they see that there aren’t any on the roster. It’s brilliant marketing. Every derelict, Diamond-wielding status chaser such as myself moans in envy when it’s announced. One day, if I keep flying and buying, it might be me up there! But if there is a 360 member on the flight roster, I’ve yet to see it. The preboard is cut from the process altogether. And I’ve anecdotally game theorized this out to be true.
On the dozens of flights my girlfriend, a Platinum Medallion (bless her heart), and I have shared this year since I’ve been a 360, we’ve never been pre-boarded. But on two separate occasions when we’ve either arrived at a destination or departed from one on separate routes, her flights, with no 360s on the list, made an announcement to preboard them. My flights were radio silent on the matter.
While visiting my family earlier this year, I cracked my father up by unleashing an exasperated diatribe on the preboarding melodrama. “That’s a good bit,” he said with a hearty laugh. Except I’m not workshopping material. I’m not trying to fill out my next 60-minute stand-up special. This is just the honest Delta 360 experience in all its glory.
The conspicuously nonexistent preboarding had been transpiring throughout the year, and then, as of May, Delta announced an official change to its boarding process. Now, “preboarding” for Delta 360 means boarding with group 2, unless you’re otherwise seated in first or business class and therefore boarding with group 1. Not only is that not preboarding—it’s mid-boarding—but it’s also right where Diamond members “preboard. What’s the difference? What’s the point?
Paring down the boarding process so that “group 1” actually refers to the first group of people sure does streamline things, and eliminates the hilarious Key & Peele-skewered travails of group 1 boarders, but then what’s the point of having a tiered out loyalty program?
Another of Delta 360’s core perks is the annual choice of a welcome gift featuring several different packages, tailored perhaps to the golfer or the business traveler, for instance. So, if you’re a dedicated spa fiend and want to wear a plush robe around the house that’s garishly branded with the Delta 360 insignia, you’re in luck.
It’s less a gift than another invitation, this time with the exclusive opportunity to be a walking billboard for a service provider that, let’s face it, on the best of days, you resign yourself to begrudgingly doing business with as the least offensive option at your disposal. It’s like being gifted a hoodie from your cable company and being grateful for the opportunity to wear it. Sure, Xfinity, I love you that much.
Can Delta Redeem Themselves?
I should be fair. Now that I expect 360 to be like Diamond but worse, because it’s supposed to be better, yet it’s the same, I suppose it’s fine. And I did once receive a one-way business class upgrade coming back from Paris to New York without using one of my precious four allotted global upgrade certificates that are offered to Diamond members. That wouldn’t have happened without being a 360. So there’s that to weigh against the three or four times I’ve called or emailed Delta 360 to tell them how much their program doesn’t deliver upon its intentions, was promised that my issue was being escalated and that I’d hear back from some theoretical specialist or metaphorical manager soon, and then, never received a response. Was that one extra upgrade in a year worth the constant micro-aggressions with which the airline pummels its supposed elite members?
[Delta 360 is] like Diamond but worse, because it’s supposed to be better, yet it’s the same…
It’s not as if I want to laud United. The Verizon Fios to Delta’s Xfinity. But at least with them, even 1K members—the Diamond equivalent, a tier below United Global Services or Delta 360—receive an unlimited opportunity for business class upgrades based upon availability and how much you fly, as opposed to four one-way upgrades per year. There’s at least a chance to capitalize on having status, rather than an eternal quest to chase it without reaping many rewards.
After I had formulated much of this story, there was a surprise development. Something happened. I got the Porsche transfer while connecting from New York to Atlanta en route to Costa Rica. The very gracious and pleasant attendant told me there are only 10 vehicles in service at ATL, hence the lack of availability, and confirmed the unpublished truth that the service is almost entirely for people paying into a separate program.
I texted a friend familiar with my travails about my change in fortune, and he asked me how I felt. Did it make it all worthwhile? Well… no. There was a sense of vindication, to a degree. But it didn’t endear the program to me or atone for prior sins.
Consider that Delta Medallion members are supposed to be thanked for their loyalty on board. It’s an embarrassing process wherein a flight attendant says something to the effect of, “good afternoon Mr. Smith, thank you for being a Delta Diamond, your business means so much and we’re really honored that you continue to choose to fly with us,” and during this whole 30 second spiel you have to smile and nod and pretend it means something to you while wishing the entire time they would stop talking and let you move on with your day.
Needless to say, this almost never happens as a Delta 360. It’s not as if I miss the experience, but if Golds and Silvers are being thanked left and right by flight attendants as if they’re so many Oprahs tossing out free cars to studio audience members, then well, I’m human enough that I want mine, too.
In another instance, en route to Greece earlier this year, the flight attendant was making her rounds and thanked my traveling companion for her Platinum status. I looked expectantly at the flight attendant. She looked at the list on her clipboard, looked me dead in the eyes, then walked down the aisle without saying a word.
On my next long-haul route with Delta, following the Porsche make good, the purser walked through the cabin making his Medallion acknowledgments and thanked my girlfriend, yet again, for being a Platinum. Knowing he wasn’t going to say anything to me, I made a sarcastic comment to the effect of it’s so nice to be a special status holder and be thanked. He looked down at his clipboard and then back at me.
“Oh, did you want to be thanked for being a 360?”
“Yeah, I guess I did.”
“Well, it’s random. We don’t know who’s who.”
“But you just looked down and confirmed you had every passenger’s info right there on your list.”
“Yeah. Well, we don’t always do it.”
“…Alright.”
Then he walked away.
Miss Platinum, meanwhile, assures me that with the self-perpetuating cycle of how much the airline disdains me fueling the amount of time I spend complaining to and about them, and therefore beginning the cycle once more, that next year I’ll be invited to join Delta 720, wherein the special perk is being offered to never fly with them ever again. At this rate, maybe that’s not such a bad idea.
Of course, I reached out to Delta asking for comment about a story I was writing on the 360 program, and, you’ll never guess it: they didn’t respond
