Hoping one can help, as we've been real light in travel this year. My wife more so than me. We've typically been gold, then moved to silver this past year, and now may not even hit that.
With a planned trip to PHX, and the outbound portion of a CVG-BLR trip left, I'll hit silver, but my wife will be about 1700 miles short. She won't do a run, and we don't have too much time to do that anyway. Obviously, would prefer to keep costs down - perhaps it could be worth buying the PQM for one of the itineraries, but typically, you can only buy too large quantities (I doubt I'll get an offer for 2000 PQM, for example).
We haven't booked the PHX ticket yet, and she has the UA select card that gets PQM for purchases on UA.com, though we tend to use our Sapphire Preferred usually, due to usually traveling with 2 kids and the insurance on that card. That could be 1000 more PQM, but even with that, would still be 700 PQM short (670, to be exact).
Any thoughts on other options? Only thought is to take a 'scenic' route to PHX via EWR/IAD vs. IAH/ORD, which could combined with using the Select to purchase could keep her covered - but also hesitant to add too much travel time (kids). Also looked at buying F to PHX one way, but the difference between the Y seats and lowest available F is like $600/person, so out of the question.
I'm almost wondering if it's worth it, and maybe we should just take my silver, and leave her as no status until she earns it again next year - that'll probably happen by mid-year as we expect travel to pick up with another trip to India in the summer. We typically travel together, so we'd still have access to free bags, it would just be economy plus that would be tough - since we're typically traveling with our daughter, so presumably we'd have to pay for one extra if we wanted that, and upgrades, as I'd only be able to choose one companion for that.
Happy to hear anything I'm probably not thinking of.