Originally Posted by
samyoull
Out of interest, what's your RU success percentage? Do you just intentionally not fly NZ much for a year to soft land to Gold?
Pretty good actually. But I don't ever lodge them on premium heavy routes like SFO or LAX. I book 1 return trip to Asia a year to use the 4 RUs, exclusively for going from Y to C. Over the last five or so years, I've only had one set not go through to C on a PVG-AKL as C was fully booked, but got into PE instead.
For jumping between Gold and Elite, I don't purposely reduce my travel on NZ, but when I'm close to the Elite re-qualifying threshold, I stop crediting to NZ (by removing my Airpoints number). Wait until the anniversary date to soft land to Gold, lodge my Gold RUs, retro-claim the trips I didn't credit over the previous months, and I'm back up to Elite within a week or two. I am also shifting a lot my travels away from NZ these days as I don't believe they have a competitive C hard product anymore, and soft product is getting less consistent by the day. This also makes holding off on re-qualifying for Elite a bit easier, but it's not a major.