Well I read it the same way you do, Rudi. That I would think you would qualify for combined travel on all SA partners. But I suspected as you did that this would be too generous (especially since they would have to give 1K status to various flyers throughout the worlkd who never even fly United).

So I just now called the MP Service Center here and asked them about this. She went to go ask a supervisor and came back with...no.

She said that when you fly Luftansa, if you have your Luftansa travel credited to your MP account, then they would apply to 1K status. But if you take the Luftansa credit instead...no...you would not get the status miles.

But I think at the end of the year if you played dumb and sent your local office a letter with a copy of the newletter explaining why you interpreted it this way, they might make some sort of accomadation?