unfortunately, short of booking earlier travel, there's no much you can do now if MPC won't play ball.
Your plan should then be to call and beg afterwards. (and then encourage them to clarify this for the rest of us!
)
I think you're on pretty good standing here, the logic makes perfect sense. Just this is going to be new territory for MPC...historically they didn't have to worry too much about this, they would retroactively give SL/GO/DM if you just missed in this manner, especially since the travel happened before the cutoff. Even more typical, people were already enough over or under the threshold that the excess elite miles were effectively "wasted", but it never really mattered because MPC always had the soft policy if you just missed this year, but went over last year with some "wasted" elite miles, then they'd give it to you.
Now that CX is handing out what are effectively cash-equivalent prizes based on additional elite miles above DM and GO, members are (understandably) going to be a bit more paranoid about the crediting dates, particularly since we're talking about folks going over DM and proactively choosing to spend on CX or OW partners in the waning months of an elite year. I think CX would be well off to credit the
flight date and not the
random crediting date. Especially since some of CX's partners can take significantly longer than CX/KA flights to post, sometimes as long as 2-3 weeks! Nor do I find it predictable...this year alone I've had AA flights credit as fast at 3 days, as long as two weeks. QR I had one post in 2 days, one in a week or so. JL I had a few that were a couple of days, but two which took 3 weeks. I didn't have to call for any of them, that was just the random times it took.
It isn't an unfathomable situation whereby someone flying a OW partner
tonight didn't get the miles credited by July 31! While that would be long, it wouldn't surprise me, and boy would that be infuriating if those were the miles to get the upgrades, extra GO card, etc.
If you can explain all that to the helpful MPC agent and send it upstairs that'd be perfect
