Originally Posted by
CyberNomad
Hello Flyertalk,
First-time poster here. I'm a frequent world traveler. My goal: get myself onto a program that will give me seat upgrades. I fly way too much, I'm too tall, and I really really want seat upgrades.
Here's my situation: I run my own business and we have millions of dollars in expenses. I could, if I wanted to, probably pay a lot of those expenses on a CC. I realized that this might be a big opportunity for me to boost myself into some excellent mileage category.
Here's the problem though: I don't have a million-dollar credit limit. More like a few thousand dollars. Can I do something like make a deposit payment on my CC, and then charge a very big amount ($300k or whatever) and get credit for that? Which CC should I go for?
I don't have a wonderful credit rating so I also am worried I'll have difficulty getting an affiliate card. However I can try; my rating is in the high 600s at this point, and going up.
Thanks!
Most of this thread was about credit cards, but in practice, you are much much better off trying to get upgrades by making a high tier of a particular airline's frequent flier program.
Amex Centurion, I think, has arrangements to get elite status on some airlines, but getting a Centurion card is not easy, and it's quite expensive.
The main thing to do would be to fly on a single airline or at least airlines in a single network. You will typically need at least 75,000 actual miles flown in a year to get to the top level, sometimes a bit more.
In some cases you can get a credit card that will help; for example, some Delta Skymiles Amex cards give extra elite qualification miles based on how much you spend.
Merely running a million or two through a credit card will not do wonders for upgrades. You can accumulate points and use them for upgrades, but typically it's not a good use of the points. You might be able to use the points for tickets, but it will depend on how flexible you are. If you charge a million a year, you could get at least a million airline points, and if you used them for overseas business class tickets and were able to get the "low mileage" awards each time, that would get you ten tickets. Bonus promotions might help you do even better. But getting elite status is probabl best of all.