But MR also has an unofficially-documented but confirmed-on-FT policy of evaluating members for status upgrade on a 12-month rolling basis every two weeks (again, there's a thread elsewhere on it with details). So if you have 49 for the year, and stay on Jan 1-2, you should be upgraded to Gold on the next bi-weekly sweep, not needing to wait 11 stays.

Of course, if you had a few stays in early Jan 09, those start dropping of the rolling 12 month total, so much depends on the actual pattern of your stays.


My comment about the risk of the strategy has to do with timing. Yes, in theory they run the carry-over program Jan 1 and everything in hunky-dorry.

But if they run the 12-month rolling evaluation on Jan 5 (just to pick a day) and upgrade you, then don't get around to running the carry-over program until Jan 10th, and it sees your current status as Gold, it may look for carry over nights over 50, not 10. That's not how it's supposed to work, but I'm busy dealing with similar timing issues with a client right now, so it's on my mind....

Here's the roll-over thread: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/marri...tion-year.html