Yeah, that's more what I meant - if you were crediting to another FF account. I hadn't thought about losing the elite bonus miles if you dropped from full Y but that makes sense too.

In my case, it was losing the K that was the issue as I couldn't use a GGU on the V that I was dropped down to. Had I known it would dump me into V, I wouldn't have made the claim. V and K were the same price when I originally booked and V went down but K did not.