Originally Posted by
Princi
Other airlines don't do this, so I can understand why you're finding it hard to believe.
For instance, with Qantas, you can go all the way to Platinum without your status credits being reset to zero - they even give you two years as a new member!
But CX resets you to zero at every upgrade. It makes Diamond hard to achieve, and once you get there, you wonder whether it was worth it ;-)
One thing I hadn't considered about the program until now...the barrier to entry is pretty high, and since officially there is no soft landing (although I realize a few people on this board have had them do that) it may give fliers an incentive to keep flying CX to maintain DM, lest they have to work all the way back up to DM again (unlike other carriers, who say would just give you top status after going 100k or 120k miles flat). Because for those of us who fly all the time maintaining DM isn't hard at all, but working up to DM still can take 6-8 mos or so (210k miles) due to all the resets. So maybe in a perverted way it keeps you hanging on, not because you love it but because you're afraid of losing it.