Departure Airport: SFO/OAK/SJC, DTW, ORD, but see below
Miles Needed: This one is tricky. Normal business travel is on track to land me at exactly 46,774 miles. So I either need 3500 miles to hit gold or 28.5K to hit platinum. I will meet the AMEX MQD waiver. These totals already include the bonus AMEX welcome miles too
Required Spend or Budget: To hit gold, 3300 MQM at ~$250-$300? For platinum, unless there's a bunch of unexpected work travel, I can't see spending the $2000 to get 28.5K miles, and I'm not super excited to pay tons of money to fly back and forth to China in economy just for the miles.
Available Travel Dates: Any, ?
Required Metal or Codeshares okay*: Don't care
I travel for work, so I can try to position to anything that I can reasonably justify (ATL, RDU?). O'hare is pretty easy. I can do various one-ways too depending on how they terminate.