Later this month, SkyMiles will be hosting a Medallion Governing Board meeting, a quarterly program created to communicate with between 10-12 of the programs’ elite-level members. The selected members will visit the airline’s Atlanta headquarters to discuss program attributes, upcoming and potential changes, analysis, product and brand positioning and overall communication and promotional planning.

Another Medallion development is an “under the radar” elite level — a fourth mysterious tier. According to Delta, the tier will be a “subset of our highest-revenue generating customers” and the specifics of the tier will not be published. But what is known, is that the members will be selected based on their total revenue contribution to Delta, which includes flight revenue as well as their partnership and co-branded credit card spend, and that the benefits will exceed those being offered to Delta’s highest-level Platinum Medallion members. Members being offered this new tier membership are being contacted now.

And finally, Delta shared with us their criteria for granting exception requests for Medallion status. There are three criteria: “close enough” — customers who had 49,200 elite qualifying miles, for instance, will be granted elite status; “revenue rewards” — a customer who is currently one tier such as Silver Medallion, and their total revenue contribution exceeds the average revenue of a higher tier member, will be granted the next higher tier; the third criteria is what Delta calls a “soft land” for all elite-level members, meaning that no customer will drop more than one tier between 2006 and 2007, regardless of how much they traveled. All members who meet these criteria will be contacted by Delta; all other requests will be looked at on a case-by-case basis. But with these criteria being carefully defined, and automated, the changes are not good for those who aren’t automatically contacted by Delta when meeting these conditions.