Gold is only high enough since very recently. It used to be only the "Diamond Force" that could widely open up award availability. It's only been this year that they've extended the "no blackouts" down to Gold.

Meanwhile, do they really hand out Gold for no stays for year-after-year REqualification? My experience with HHonors for the past few years is that EVERYTHING is targeted, and they decide what they want to target you with, and if they don't want to target you with an easy REqualificaiton, they don't. (And while there's a lot of hype in the HHonors forum about some offer just for FT members to exchange one targeted promo for another, read down the newer pages of the thread and find out about how this isn't working for anyone! The person who posted it seems to have vanished.)

So far HHonors keeps giving me the most useless (to me) thing: Double or triple points after double or triple points. So all I end up with (if I stay there) is more points I cannot figure out how to use. I'd stay more if they let me requalify for fewer stays or get double miles instead, but no, just more points and points and points, which I don't know I'll use for after October. (Before, besides using them for the Scandic "loophole", I was saving up for Salt Lick. But that's gone too. I have no use for awards which are 6 days in a row in the same location on some beach, I'm into exploring the world, not lounging around, on my vacations. And when in Rome, I want to bit in the city, not in some remote place in the boondocks, no matter how nice the place and its immediate boondocks.)

Scandic may have been a loophole, to be sure. But the problem is that every other "non-loophole" place where I look at an HHonors award, it always seems to be a very poor value compared to theoretical Point Stretchers and such, but the Point Stretchers never mesh with my travel plans. That feels not so much like redemption "creep" as "redemption bait and switch" to me!