Originally Posted by
MarkOK
I doubt too many people are bothering with all of this if they never/rarely redeem benefits. What this portal is doing is making it way easy for people like me (who fly about 30-35 segments a year, primarily domestic) to go from a borderline Gold/Plat traveler to ExecPlat + SWUs for my 1-2 long hauls a year. The question is how much cost/benefit is AA getting from their golds/plats going to Exec Plat because they spend ~10K through the eshopping portal....
For me this is great because I fly a lot on cheap fares. There's no way I will spend $18k on airfare in a year. My average domestic round trip is well under $500. Even for international trips I can often find good deals -- I applied SWUs to each direction of a $930 BE round trip fare to Seoul. At the end of the year my spend will be somewhere in the $5k to $7k range which would leave me somewhere between a quarter and a third of the way to requalifying (I originally got my status comped through the Hyatt Globalist promo in 2019).
I would argue that I get better value out of the status than people who spend a lot on expensive premium cabin fares (since I get upgraded, and they have nowhere to upgrade to). I'm currently sitting in F (upgraded from a BE fare).