Originally Posted by
Tizzette
Your present status and number of points appears at the very top of the page. Underneath that is a bar with a pointer that tracks your stays for the current year. There are credit card Golds who never even make Silver on that bar. Otherwise, why bother with credit card status? Desk clerks have some discretion about upgrades and my opinion is, number of stays makes a difference.
Yes, of course, but that nothing to with credit cards. My status is Gold and I have 2 stays and 3 nights showing year to date, but I don't have (and never have had) a Gold-qualifying credit card either. I got my status through
the Milepoint Premium $50 offer last year. (Before that, I got my status through a Fast Track of 4 stays in 90 days, in April 2012.)
(One thing to keep in mind: Statuses earned through "shortcuts" other than credit cards only need to be earned once every 2 years, if they're earned April or later. But a credit card has to be kept every year to continue the status.)
And speaking of stays/nights making a difference, that can even apply if you earned Gold through stay/nights. Someone who's almost at Diamond may have priority for an upgrade over someone who just barely qualified for Gold through stays (but not nights).
(SPG is a program that allows qualifcation for some status with either stays or nights, but reserves the highest statuses only for those qualify with nights. So it dangles the carrott in front of those who stay one night at a time, but gives the tastiest carrott only those who stay a lot of nights.)
But it all depends on how competitive your stay situation is. If you're a leisure traveler in "average" location on a weekend, you may have precious little competition with higher status than you, even if you have very few nights/stays showing. Just like some airline routes are more elite-heavy than others (and at certain times on certain days), so I'm sure that some hotels are more elite-heavy than others (and on certain days but not so much on other days).
Go stay for one night the day after Chrsitmas at some business-convention-heavy location as an HH Gold, and watch yourself get upgraded to the biggest suite they have to offer. Then come back to the same locaiton anytime a big convention is going on, and watch yourself get not a single upgrade.
So IMHO it's hard to generalize much more than statistics. Yes, everything else being equal, the hotel may give upgrades to those with more nights/stays showing than those with less. But everything else is rarely equal...