Originally Posted by
VegasGambler
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).
My average round trip this year is more like $600 (pre-pandemic, it was ~$400), and like you, even my 1-2 a year international trips are about $1000, which came with practically no EQD (or LPs now) because the actual "fare" part was tiny. Pre 2018, I wasn't quite cracking gold status with about 6 trips a year, but then I had a well time Plat Pro promo status, and then Hyatt gave me Exec Plat for 2020, 2021 was an extension, 2022 was earned from the CC spend promo, and I was well prepared to drop back down to gold.
But, now, no way. Way easy to get to 200K LPs, and since I always have 4+ segments per roundtrip (as a tiny outstation), the 30 segments for SWUs is pretty much happening naturally anyways.
Originally Posted by
vasantn
It seems there are about 6 of us on this board who actually get it, while others keep talking about having to put $200K on an AA-branded credit card.
...
BTW I'm not finding giftcards.com to be fun. Too glitchy and too much bookkeeping for me. I gave up on it after my first purchase of $2500. I'm already nearly at 150K LPs and have a bunch of flights coming up.
....
When this all started, I was thinking mostly in terms of CC spend, and was shooting for 125K LPs, but CC spend is much slower than eshopping, simply miles, and for those who do it, the hotels. I am just doing enough CC spend for the 10K LP bonus but then it's back in the drawer, I can get what I need through these other means and still collect my points and cash back on my other cards.
As for the giftcards, I see the benefit, but I'm not into that either (and so don't bother with it).