Delta Finds Loyalty Program Tailwind At Tour Championship

ATLANTA, GEORGIA – AUGUST 21: Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland waves his ball on the 18th green during the first round of the TOUR Championship at East Lake Golf Club on August 21, 2025 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Ben Jared/PGA TOUR via Getty Images)

PGA TOUR

The parallels between golf and finance are widely appreciated—the sport’s risk-reward dynamics closely mirror investment decision-making: play it safe and take the hazard out of play, or, weighting the probabilities, decide to boldly take the hero shot.

But airlines might actually be the more copacetic corporate pairing. Balls literally take off from the tee and when the path of a well-flighted approach shot lands safely on the green, there’s still work to do to smoothly taxi that flying orb to the gate…er…cup, to avoid a dreaded three-putt.

In March, Delta became the PGA Tour’s official global airline under a multi-year deal that includes access to tournaments and the Tour-owned TPC Network of courses. The premium cabin is Delta’s revenue growth driver, and the premiumization race now firmly extends to experiences offered to loyal customers. The partnership expands the breadth of what SkyMiles members can bid on through the relaunched SkyMiles Experiences platform.

“We’ve got over 500,000 customers a day that step onboard Delta aircraft and they’re all going somewhere to do something that is very special and meaningful to them. When we pulse them on where they want us to be, golf is absolutely a lifestyle experience that our customers value and are traveling to,” Alicia Tillman, chief marketing officer at Delta, explained.

The PGA Tour deal augments Delta’s existing golf presence, which includes partnerships with the Masters, the LPGA’s Mizuho Americas Open and a roster of individual ambassadors that counts Patrick Cantlay, Tony Finau, and Nelly Korda among their crew. Current golf themed packages up for bid to loyalty members looking to swap miles for first page of the leaderboard caliber memories include a weekend of golf at TPC Sawgrass that comes with a clubhouse tour and instruction at the performance center. Another curated experience on offer is a chance to play in the Bank of Utah Championship Pro-Am at Black Desert Resort alongside a tour player.

At the ongoing Tour Championship at East Lake, yet another Delta experiential offering was on full display: loyalty members participated in a putting clinic with Hall of Famer Davis Love III as part of a package that also included reserved seating at the Delta Starter Lounge on the first tee.

The 21-time PGA Tour winner engaged a small group on a practice green, going over technique, drills and flatstick psychology while also regaling them with stories about golf greats—like how keeping an eye on the hole helped Beth Daniel transform her putting game.

“She started putting looking at the hole from probably fifteen feet and in and the next year she won seven tournaments. She went from—and I’m telling you she couldn’t make it from two feet—to all of a sudden being the best player in the world. So, it’s all in your head,” he said.

Love still chuckles about the time Michael Jordan snapped his driver back in college—a mishap that pushed him into a new club that’d stay in his bag for over a decade, and left the two Tar Heels, both bound for Hall of Fame careers, with a killer yarn that still hits all these years later. His Airness owes DL3 for turning him on to his second sport of choice.

Davis was in a psychology class with MJ’s roommate and teammate Buzz Peterson and when the two played rounds on the university course, Jordan would tag along for kicks.

“Michael would come and ride in the cart with us and keep score before he knew how to play golf,” Davis explained. “We didn’t really teach him how to play, we taught him how to gamble, ‘ok you’re two down, you need to press’” Love added. Jordan started to take a few swings every now and then, when he felt confident enough, he took a gander at Love’s big stick, a MacGregor 693 wooden driver.

“Michael gets up and he’s trying to hit a driver for the first time and he hits it dead in the heel and right in the shaft and it shattered,” Love said.

Jordan had thought he’d been set up for a practical joke. “I said no I bought that with my own money and that is ‘the driver’ and I’m the longest hitter in college and amateur golf.” That broken driver would become a prized possession and he’d keep its replacement in play from that summer of 1985 on through 1997.

Touchstone moments like that—intensely personal, and enduring—are exactly the kind Delta is trying to cultivate. The airline is betting that experiences, not just itineraries, are the driver of lasting loyalty.

Delta is going beyond the business of moving passengers from one place to another. By pushing SkyMiles beyond flights and seat upgrades into the realm of curated, high-touch experiences, the airline is engineering a shift in its brand DNA—from a legacy carrier defined by hospitable and reliable conveyance to one that stakes equity in the most resonant part of travel: the actual memory-making.

The pivot is more than cosmetic. It’s a loyalty play designed to keep customers invested not just in where Delta takes them, but in how that journey lives on afterwards.