You also need to consider breakage of the award instruments and travel vouchers that we are given. We are coming up on the end of the status year for UA, which is Jan 31, 2011. It's obvious that a lot of SWUs will expire unused - and yet that drove our behavior to qualify for status. Also, I suspect that a significant percentage of travel vouchers folks are given expire unused. For US, my husband was given a $200 voucher to compensate him for a delayed flight and forced overnight stay in Phoenix. Sounds good, right? Well, it must be used by him alone and he has not purchased a flight on US in 20 years. (He was flying on a UA award ticket.) UA hands out travel vouchers for flight irregularities. They come in electronic format, but are not attached to our Mileage Plus accounts. Thus, we need to keep careful track of them. I suspect many people are not sufficiently organized to do so. And even when they were paper, I saw the travel file of a friend who had thousands of dollars of vouchers which had expired without use. I wanted to weep.