Emirates just matched my LH SEN+BA Silver to Skywards Gold through Feb 2011. While logged into my Skywards Blue account, I sent off a query under the subject Skywards Tiers (or something like that) and the match request was forwarded to the London office. Gold kit arrived via Fedex in a couple of weeks. I did tell them who I worked for, and we do use EK as a preferred carrier for shorthaul out of our DXB office, so I don't know whether that made a difference.