Originally Posted by
char777
I think you raise a good point, though I do think CC spend is probably enough to make or break Silver and Gold for a not-insignificant amount of people. It’s probably less of a factor at the Plat and 1K levels given how much is still needed to reach those.
I agree that there are probably very few people out there putting crazy amounts of spend on UA cards but not flying UA much or at all. With that said, there’s probably a good number of people who fly UA a dozen or so times a year, and the ~1,000 PQP they get from their Explorer cards is enough to get them over the Silver threshold.
agreed here (as a silver who, as I said upthread, earned/will earn about 20% of my PQP this year from card spend. also, I think, easier of a justification for the floor benefits than the higher level benefits. For those looking for bag fee waivers, for example, once you’ve hit silver, there doesn’t need to be more than that. If you want E+, after gold, there’s not much reason to spend to hit the higher levels.
id also bring up the bad deal of getting higher level status from significant card spend and not much flying. If you really don’t fly that much, why would you put effort into all those benefits you’ll use so little? Sure, it sounds nice to get E+ for free, but honestly, isn’t it just easier (and quite honestly, probably cheaper) to pay for E+ if you can say, count the number of times you’ll use it on one hand vs. making the effort to put all that spend on a UA card (while also forgoing other cards better benefits to do so?).