emcampbe

Last year, I believe there were offers to buy up to the next status level. IIRC, you didn't buy PQD per say, but bought the next level of status, basically waiving PQD. The price one was offered almost 100% for sure took into account what your PQM/PQS/PQD were.

While these offers will likely come up again on a targeted basis, the question is who will be targeted, I.e., how close to the next level do you need to be to get the offer. Is having the miles for gold but only half the PQD going to get you the offer, or will you need to have closer to 75% of the PQD? Will being 30% short of the miles and PQD get it, or will you need to be within 15%? A lot of these targets are probably going to be determined at the end of the year, when UA has a better idea of how close they are coming to having met their goals for each level. Two many elites and the offers may be fewer and cost more, too few, and there may be more and they are not as much (not that they won't be pricey either way).

IMO, it's always cheaper to actually purchase additional flights during the year to make up for what you might be missing than taking these buy up offers after the year is complete. UA has complete pricing power at this point since it's the only way to get the next status level of that what you really want. If you are only short, say, $500 PQD, you can expect an offer way higher than that. Plus, the offers generally come in packages. If you are say, 100 miles short, the cheapest buy up offer will be for, say, 1000 miles. There's lots of time in the year to plan - so you can do a MR (or spend run?), take a weekend to visit a friend you haven't seen in a while, or even just bump up a fare class or two on your existing trips to make it.