Elite status to me is worth the extra one or two flights a year I take to maintain it. The effort was worth it when last year, my wife and I traveling as Premiers (UA's lowest tier) were upgraded at the gate from an S coach fare to business class because coach had been oversold, on a flight from San Francisco to London. S class was so low that a UA ticket agent told me she had never heard of that class, and the fare is consistently not upgradeable. Our status got us two of the eight free upgrades that UA handed out at the gate.