Last updated on June 17th, 2013 at 01:23 pm
In early May, 2013, Delta announced that they would be selling Delta gift certificates on their website (or as they call them, eGift certificates). While this may be known to a few people, it doesn’t seem that Delta has been doing a very good job of promoting this new feature, and it’s not particularly easy to find on their website. I even had a hard time finding the site again to write this post after making a purchase a few weeks ago.
The premise behind Delta gift certificates is simple: you pre-pay to purchase a gift certificate on Delta and you send someone (or yourself) the gift of travel. The rest of this post will walk you through the Delta eGift process.
Purchasing a Delta Gift Certificate
If you are interested in purchasing a Delta Gift Certificate, you can visit the Delta eGift section of their site (note, you will need to be logged in to your Delta account for this link to work).
Just in case you have problems with that link, here is the full URL that worked for me: https://www.delta.com/egift/eGiftPurchase.action?icid=PROD_eGift_Launch
That will take you to a page that looks like this, where you can send eGift certificates to recipients of denominations from $50 to $1,000. You can send in $5 increments.
In my case, I had a nagging $800 left to spend in order to meet the minimum credit card spend requirements for achieving a signup bonus. I also knew that I would have $800 worth of travel on Delta coming up (between me and my wife), so I decided to purchase an $800 eGift for myself.
Hey Jeffsetter, it’s yo birfday!
After filling out the vital details and paying via credit card, my work as a sugar daddy to myself was done. Within a few minutes of signing up for the card, the Delta gift certificate arrived in my inbox for redemption.
Redeeming a Delta eGift Certificate
Hooray, I now have an $800 Delta gift certificate to use on travel, now what? Delta actually does a very poor job of telling you how to redeem an eGift, so you need to do some sleuthing in order to find the answer.
The eGift certificate does not show up in your Delta account, because that would be too easy. In addition, you can’t link that eGift to your account in the future, either, because the eGift is not tied to your name/Skymiles account.
In other words, all you really have to show for your eGift is an email in your inbox.
After looking around desperately for the answer, I found that you can simply go to www.delta.com/redeem and you will be redirected to a page on Delta.com where you can put in your certificate number for redemption.
Enter your certificate number and other information from that email and you can start to look for flights while using the certificate as your main form of payment. Fairly painless.
Here’s what it looks like when you have a certificate ready to use for purchasing airline tickets.
You can now purchase airfare as needed and the Gift Certificate will be applied against the cost of your ticket.
Delta Gift Certificates for Minimum Credit Card Spend?
Now that we have gone through the process of purchasing a Delta eGift and using it for travel, do we think that this is a viable way to manufacture minimum spend required for a credit card signup bonus? Personally, I think it is a great trick if you meet the following two criteria:
- You will be flying on Delta within the next 6 months and plan to use the credit (because you are just pre-paying for your travel with this method)
- You have a small balance left to meet your minimum credit card requirement (less than $1,000)
This method works if you want to pre-pay your travel while meeting your minimum spend requirements, but it’s not sustainable for the long haul, because the spend is not reimbursable in the long run (unless you are using this for business trips). Since it’s not a zero-sum game like gift cards and vanilla reloads, it would be difficult to use this method more than a few times a year to manufacture spend.
I pulled it out of my back pocket to meet a deadline and plan on doing it a few more times this year.
What are your thoughts on paying it forward to meet minimum credit card spend?