Originally Posted by Globaliser

And there I was, thinking that in the ostentatious money-spending Mecca that is Hong Kong, $100K of shopping was a trivial sum ...

Anyway, slightly less frivolously, I was wondering about qualifying by including a lower welcome bonus level, if you actually only need 25,000 miles to trigger the status extension. But as in all of these things, if you're not flying then there's a real question as to why you'd want to put in a great deal of effort to maintain your status.