pavo

Hi,

Long time reader first time poster.

I enrolled in a GLD challenge with AA. I had about 4k miles in my account at the time, and enrolled RIGHT after I returned home from a weeklong JFK-SAN r/t. The aadvantage folks told me I would be able to get retro credit for the trip home, but not the outbound. This was because the trip home hadn't posted yet-- whereas my outbound had. So, about 1500 Q-points for that one segment towards my challenge.

I just got back from a LGA-MIA r/t (the return was MIA-BOS-LGA due to timing-- we were getting off a cruise ship.)

Now here is the interesting part and the start of my question. The cruise ship had a program to check and valet our luggage directly to airport from the boat, and print out our boarding passes and check us in while we were still at sea. ( $10/person. Questioned the value there until we got to MIA and I saw the lines going out to the sidewalk for Aagents, and the cattle call for baggage tags at self-service-- I will gladly pay $10 anytime to bypass that!) My girlfriend and I took advantage of this, but when looking at my boarding passes, I first noticed that even though we were seated together, we were in different boarding groups (myself in Group 1 of course) then saw RUBY, and then near my name and FF#, GLD.

I have an amex gold, but no other FF programs, did not earn enough Q points on a mere 2 legs (SAN-JFK and LGA-MIA), did not make any requests, nothing, and yet when I got back home and logged into AA.com, I saw that I was now indeed gold.

I'm a little scared of contacting AA and asking how I became GLD, lest it be an error and taken away. But I'm extremely curious what happened, and if the fact that I was enrolled in a GLD challenge had anything to do with it.

Any thoughts or speculations are welcome. Please save griping about how everyone and their cousin has status these days for another thread. Thanks!