The carryover on the card isn't a bad idea, it is just poorly implemented. The idea of giving someone who was basically "Double Gold" (i.e. who had managed to rack up 100,000 tier points) a year for "free" isn't odious to a program like this...it is when you actually trigger an incentive to "miss" a tier by a few inches so as to vault tiers the next year. The way I see it, someone who has 45,000 tier points in a year can choose to shoot for gold...or get silver completely for free for two years.

I'd actually be in qualified support of this being tweaked, though I'm not sure what would strike a good balance here. It might make more sense to simply divide one's existing tier points in half for their starting point for the next year or permit a carry-over of up to a given amount regardless of account balance or something like that.

Also, I just had points post for my flight on 1/1, so I'm now over 16k. One thing that is going to get sticky for Virgin is this: What happens if someone pops over 20k/50k before they reset the system, gets tripped for Silver/Gold, and then gets knocked back down? i.e. If I didn't have the card and that last leg had put me over 20k, where would I be status-wise? I ask because if this lasts more than a few days, I'd be surprised if at least a few users didn't get into such a situation.