Delta Hotels Privilege interim changes announced prior to an entirely new program coming this fall

We just received the following email from Delta Hotels. They are making some interim changes to their program prior to completely relaunching it in the fall of 2014:

To ensure Delta Privilege remains competitive, and to pave the way for a rewarding new program set to launch in Autumn 2014, changes to the current program needed to be made. These changes to benefits will be effective for reservations made after February 28, 2014 for stays starting on or after March 1, 2014.

♦ Upgrade to Gold – Now in as little as five stays* or 10 room nights, you can be upgraded to Gold and earn all the rewards of a Delta Privilege member, plus:

     ♦ $200 hotel credit to be used towards dining, guest rooms, meetings and events
     ♦ Two upgrades at time of check-in, based on availability
     ♦ Nightly turndown service (upon request)**
     ♦ Enhanced partnership savings and rewards with Avis

♦ Extended Check-out –This benefit is no longer available for Base members.

♦ Qualifying stays/rates – Effective January 15, 2014, there will be changes to the rate types that qualify for Delta Privilege status stays and Aeroplan miles. Please see chart below:

These qualifying rate changes put a damper in a strategy I was developing and was going to post here on the Rewards Canada blog this week! I'll reveal it now as it only has 8 days left to work. That strategy was to book Delta Hotel stays via Rocketmiles, the third party site that offers miles for booking through them. Since they offer Delta Hotels and the rates provided seem to be eligible rates it could have worked to be a quadruple dip strategy. How? Dip 1 was to book via Rocketmiles.com (if you haven't joined yet you can join via my link and get an additional 1,000 miles on your first stay, I will also receive a referral credit), Dip 2 was putting on reward credit card to earn miles or points on the actual charge, Dip 3 is the base Aeroplan miles earned on the stay and Dip 4 is the current Aeroplan bonus offer of up to Triple Bonus Miles on Delta stays until Apr 30. Have fun earning evenmore miles if you plan any Delta stays in the next week or so as after the 15th this strategy is dead.



Anyways, on to the actual interim changes of the program!
Nice to see the Gold benefit being achievable faster on the nights side. Currently the requirement is 5 stays or 20 nights but with the interim program it will only be 10 nights.

Sad to see the extended check out being taken away for base members, I have actually  utilized this benefit before and was planning on making use of it in the future.

Other than these three changes the program will remain the same until the new one is revealed sometime this fall!