Thanks for the quick replies - much appreciated. It's a rather unique earning structure, isn't it? That's why I felt I had to double check...in case I had somehow remembered it wrongly.

fakecd, thanks for appreciation of our situation. We agree wholeheartedly that QF has become most arrogant - roll on CX or SQ access to AUS-US routes, that should sort them out

DrD's travel is paid J (apart from very short Asia regional hops in Y). I can see 150k CX club miles in a year as easily attainable from his travel patterns, but 210k in one year is stretching. Have to have a very good look now at how to extend the QF by an extra year whilst accomplishing the CX move, it really looks to me to be a 2 year process: 1st year MPO Gold, second year Diamond. Maintaining at Diamond then shouldn't be a problem.

Guy Betsy: nice of you to mention AA. I've looked into it before in some detail. A nice earner, but for various reasons we prefer to keep to the plans of the airlines on which we travel the most.

Previously that was QF, with roughly 2/3 of our paid travel on QF/BA and the rest scattered. Over the last two years, we've chosen to migrate to CX, which now accounts for half, with QF/BA scraping for a quarter share. There's a lot of factors in there, service quality being one, and really QF is still only getting some of our business out of loyalty (and they've shown again how little they value that ) and the fact that they're the only quality domestic airline in Australia.

Thanks again.

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who had achieved Green to Diamond in one year by invitation after showing a demonstrable pattern of 120K + miles in J.