Well, IMHO you will be enormously disappointed if you subscribe to a logic of "investment" when it comes to elite status in FFPs. The only case you will not be let down is when you get status as a result of your necessary (business, vacation, etc.) flight activity. That is, when you have invested
zip (as in zero) in terms of money, time, etc. in attaining your status.
Of course, the above "definition" risks to fall victim of itself, since it hinges to a "proper" definition of "necessary": addicted FTers will always convince themselves that a ...RTW routing on a FRA-MUC trip, those countless hours in the lounges munching chips, cheese substitutes and plastic yogurts were absolutely necessary to feed their addiction (no pun intended). And the worse: they will be right!
But let's restrict our talk to "hard" stuff. If you start mileage runs (or you go out of your way to fly JFK-EZE as JFK-FRA-EZE 'cause you get HON miles ) because you are, e.g., 100K short of HON then you will
never get your value back in terms of "hard" goods or services. Even in the case where you manage to get those 100K HON miles for as cheap as 5K EUR (and I'm totally letting aside the inconvenience that cheap flying entails).
Note, that I don't blame anyone for doing this, so don't get me wrong. I'm not the one who's gonna dictate to someone how they should lead their lives, let alone how they should price their ego
. Myself, I
do waste my money in a wide array of useless things.
After all, this board blatantly manifests that there
are people out there who
do care about being addressed by name on a plane (as a necessary trailer to the primordial dilemma "chicken or pasta?") while they wouldn't care about it while sitting in a Michelin "trois étoiles" restaurant.
The same people who will raise a stink about not sitting alone during a 2 min ride on the way to a 20 square meter tube they'll eagerly share with 15 strangers for the next 14 hours!