almost all airline and hotel programs have elite programs that are not listed in their general membership guide either. They are invitation only and you will not find information on their Web sites about them, though you will see reference about them on FlyerTalk. Why hide the information? Spend a day wit ha moderator who has to track 76 posts by a new member whose only contribution in each of the 76 posts is "i agree." If you have about 5 hours a week to devote to such a task, then we've got a job for you. There are certain benefits that flyerTalk would like to provide those members who have positively contributed to FlyerTalk over time. We've always thought that the surprise of something you did not know about made it even more special. There are some arguments that someone posting less with quality is just as important as someone posting more without quality. I and our other volunteers have never disagreed with that. But until such time as it is possible to read and analyze each of the 6.2 million posts on flyerTalk and categorize them as quality or not and then match then with each of 112,000 members, we're pretty much stuck with a dumb-dumb basic system because as it is, each of the volunteers takes their time away from using FlyerTalk to benefit their own travel knowledge just to monitor the "I agrees," and much more. The volunteers are the ones being cheated if one were to ask me.

While sorry we are useless, we have in fact reviewed this policy annually and have yet to come up with anything that would reasonably work in environment i have just outlined. Suggestions could always be made and there is a forum for that. As an aside, the OMNI forum because of the strain it takes to try and monitor always runs short-handed with volunteers. Making it easier or more apparent would only burden an already strained system. We as we have always done, try and do the best we can with what we have. It does to our joy, tend to please far more than it does not.

Hope this helps.

Want to test my information? The secret program for Continental Airlines is called Chairman's Circle. Visit onepass.com and use their search engine to see what information they make available to members. It is fairly common to want to provide special things for certain groups of members in any industry and I'm sorry we have confused anyone. Frankly, if everyone just went around posting on FlyerTalk with no expectation and no one ever even thought to mention OMNI or Coupon Connection, life and the surprises you get when participating on FlyerTalk would be even a bit more enjoyable.