<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Wingnut:
It depends on how long it takes the partner airline to post the points through and on how long before you return. If the points have posted, they can always look you up at the lounge reception desk.
The trick with moving up a tier is making sure they don't steal all your points off you!
Let's say that by the time you get to LAX on the outbound you have 495 points. That next flight gets you 280, but you hit a threshold so your status points balance returns to zero, not 275. A friendly call to diamond club should get them to credit the extra 275 points (it worked for me once), but as far as I'm aware it's discretionary and they're within the rules not to let you have them.</font>
It's worse than that. Let's say the 280 points that put you over the qualifying mark don't post on the account until after the return MEX-LAX flight. You should get Silver status on the flight date, but the computer sometimes (it did in my case) puts it from the posting date. In the example above that is 555 missing membership points.
I got caught with this and missed out on 390 membership points towards renewal of Gold status. I just discovered this a month short of my renewal date and 10 months after it happened. Faxed DC the old statements and they've renewed me for another year :-)
Good thing too ...
- Simon