Originally Posted by
Oil-man
The whole point of gold is that you get it for free, and it's effectively paid for by your company
Humph. Someone else forgetting that some of us actually pay for our tickets with our own money.
I may be a mere Silver, but the same point applies to some Golds I know.
The benefit of being near the top of a waitlist, a few more miles (which you don't spend anyway) and/or a few times in the Flounge is nowhere near 500 Euros.
Which waitlist are you referring to?
There'a quite a few more benefits. F check-in is often quite a bit quicker then Club check-in (plus you get to use the check-in thrones at T5). You get a more helpful and faster phone line which I think is a real boon. You get certain fees waived. You get access to certain blocked seats in F and CE. And unless most of your flights are in F or between airports with no Flounge, all those lounge visits are not to be sneezed at.
I think there are a few more obscure benefits too. Can't Golds book get redemptions from revenue buckets at double miles or something like that? I'm sure that someone who actually is Gold can fill you in.
My advice if you're not short of a few Euros: go for it, and then come back in a year and tell us if it was worth it. I'm not general a huge fan of TP runs, and I hate those "What's the fastest way to Silver?" questions, but when you're just a few points short like this then I think you should do it; although if you were London-based then a CE return from LGW to a number of destinations would be a significantly cheaper I think.