Renee’s Points just posted a blog post that Delta has finally relaxed the rules about upgrades when you use your annual Delta American Express Companion Certificate (The Delta Platinum Amex provides one certificate a year to fly a companion with you for just taxes and fees on any S/L/U/T fare).
For years, the policy has been that both passengers on one of these certificates were ineligible for upgrades, making their use on a long flight far less appealing. In the early days of the certificate program, people could call Delta after ticketing, split the two passengers into separate record locators, and at least get an upgrade on the primary passenger’s ticket. But a few years ago that loophole was sealed shut.
Given Delta’s de-hancements in some areas of Skymiles,- like the inability to get a complimentary (status) upgrade on transcontinental routes with the Delta One product (i.e. JFK-LAX/SFO, DCA-LAX, and BOS-SFO), the introduction of “sidegrades” into Economy Comfort but without the ability to exclude being upgraded into a middle seat, and the move towards secret pricing of award tickets (unpublishing their award chart and testing dynamic award pricing), it’s nice to see this improvement.
Note: Renee did post an image of the rule change but it’s been pulled from the Delta website. Possibly because Amex compliance hadn’t yet cleared it.
