Diamond status expired 12/31/09. Had already decided to heavily book January and take some mileage runs to cement status til 2/12. Unfortunately, that meant I would not get Diamond bonuses but the free nights were too hard to pass up. Just took me longer than it should to decide to do this - but then again, I get an extra year of status by doing it in January.

Lo and behold, January 1 comes and I'm still Diamond. And for the first 6 stays, I got the benefits. Signed on yesterday and it changed to Platinum.

I figured that maybe they had extended the status because some computer looked at my outstanding reservations. Clearly, I was wrong - but a the title says, it was nice while it lasted.