Ah, status dilution. In all my years of observing and qualifying this topic, i have found it is often viewed one of three different ways, each a perspective of where your personal interest and personal bias starts and ends.

The three perspectives:
- emotional. Likely the biggest factor is many members view of this. It often starts with seeing a promotion or offer in which status can be accelerated. Believing that the offer will bring more status members into the program is reasonable to believe that there will be dilution to your personal level of status.

- factual. Over the years, there's actually been a fairly level percentage of members to the elite levels of major programs and while select promotions such as double EQMs and partner promo status count and even credit card may seem to have greatly effected the status level of these programs, there's really such a small float to the active participation of status that factually we can say that there has been little or no dilution to these programs in terms of overall membership fighting for basic number of benefits. For instance, there has been a real exodus over the past 5 years of what we're refer to as the "baby boomer bust" of elite members. This aging population is naturally leaving the ranks of elites as business travelers leaving a hole to be filled with what I refer to above, all without disturbing the natural 2-5% (depending on the program) percentage of active members of these programs who are in some level of status with a program.

- bias by outside influence. This as well ranks high and is often of the misconnection of the dots. Whenever any member feels that their ability to upgrade has seen a decline in clearing or some other measure of use of a program, the immediate feeling is that it must be because of status dilution in that the airline must have made it too easy to be elite and as a result my personal performance goes down. Measuring such things as personal performance of elite benefits is not always an accurate measure of status dilution. For instance, starting in 2002 and when travel really regained it's full strength, it was cause for alarm that the airlines were cutting back on elite upgrades. Fact is, during that period the Sky Marshall program started to really impact available upgrade seats when 4-11% of first class seats were being allocated to this program bringing down the actual available inventory. Again, outside influence, not really status dilution as a result of something the airlines were doing.

I spend enough time with airlines and hotels to get glimpses of actual statistics of these kinds of cause and effect and again, while there are smaller deviations of the norm, overall I really can't say that there is any actual status dilution.

I've got a few other thoughts on this but believe that generally complaints about status dilution come from the emotional observation of these programs, rather than the factual.

Love top hear more from you and we can have a pleasant dialogue on this. Thanks for the question.