booyun

I matched to MVP Gold earlier in the year (Feb 17) so I have status through the end of the year. I am currently sitting at 49,775 EQM this year. If I get to 50k before October, will nothing change and I stay MVP Gold through year end? Or do they give me the status through next year since I was already MVP Gold?

ashill

Once you earn 50k EQMs in the year, any challenge is irrelevant. If you earn 50k EQMs in 2017, you have MVP Gold status for the rest of 2017 and all of 2018.

The October cutoff is only relevant for the challenge; it is not relevant for status earned by flying 50k EQMs.

booyun

Sweet, thanks ashill!! That is exactly the answer I was (hoping) looking for!

rxgeek

Same question. Wife is AA Plat with no revenue miles flown, only awards.

ashill

AS matched my lame duck AA Platinum status to MVP Gold in late 2016. I had something like 10,000 EQMs on AA in 2016 at the time.

dmach

I'm debating.

I've been 1K on UA since 2006, MM since 2012, but since 2015 I've been watching my earned award miles plummet precipitously. The vast majority of my flying is domestic (and a mix of transcons, midcons, and up and down the west coast), and the new Basic Economy basically means I pay anywhere from $10 to $50 more per one-way to get the elite status benefits and earning I had before.

Then add in all the great things I've heard about AS from friends in SEA, the seemingly more generous program benefits, and the merger with VX opening up a whole lot more routes from my home airport (SFO)...and I've dipped my toes in the water with AS. The 5K bonus just for signing up and flying before 12/31, the 30K bonus from the credit card, and $80 per ticket (x 2 tickets) savings was enough for me to (gasp!) book a SFO-SEA RT with AS.

But status match...what to do? If I ask for a status match now, I'll cover my trip to SEA (10/2 - 10/8), but then it looks like only hold status through the end of 2017 if the Oct 1 cutoff is still current. I only have ~15K miles of planned travel in Q4 that isn't already booked, so I couldn't get to elite status just on flying in 2017.

If I submit on 10/1 (and hope that it would apply through 2018), I can shift a good portion of 2018 flying to AS, and probably maintain at least MVP Gold. (AS still doesn't go everywhere I need to go, and this homey don't play AA, no how, no way!) But then the SEA trip probably will be at peon status.

I think I may have answered my own question, but I welcome any insights from the more experienced AS flyers here. :-) Thanks in advance.

tom911

I'm curious if anyone has been successful submitting their request in September, knowing it takes some time to process (21 days for mine last year), and just asked to have it start on October 1. Would be a great workaround if they allowed something like that. If not, you're stuck with asking after October 1. Wouldn't make much sense for a status match that only works the last 3 months of 2017.

milypan

It's a two hour flight. They're not selling you a BE equivalent ticket. You'll survive.

I've done up to six hour flights (transcon and Hawaii) on AS/VX this year while waiting for the Oct status match. Honestly it's not that bad...basically my first time flying without status in almost a decade, other than a few very short flights here and there, and it makes me realize that status is overrated (perhaps in part because it's been devalued, and perhaps in part because things like Precheck, credit card, and an infant get you a bunch of the benefits anyway).

Overall I'm pretty happy with my AS/VX experiences so far, even in the latter half of the plane. But one thing I have noticed: for whatever reason their aircraft interiors seem a lot dirtier than UA's, regardless of cabin.

dmach

Of course I will! I was being a bit cheeky. I didn't mean to come across as whining. Global Entry (and hence Precheck) and the AS credit card take me pretty far. I'm just getting used to change, and climbing a new ladder.

I've been fiercely loyal to UA for close to two decades. My last non-Star Alliance flight was in 2013 -- and that was only one leg. My last round trip ticket on a non-Star Alliance airline was in 2009. But with my earning as degraded as it's become on UA, my upgrades nearly nonexistent on the transcons, and Saver Award availability more and more limited, I felt squeezed. But then living in a UA hub city, there were still lots of flights to lots of places I wanted / needed to go. Now the AS/VX merger is tipping that balance, especially when I looked at all the routes being added over the next several months.

milypan

Living next to the same UA hub, I face the same choices. You've probably already noticed this, but even when AS/VX serve a city, the frequencies are far more limited. For example, we're taking a family trip to SLC later this year, and ideally we'd like to take AS, but the outbound flight is super late in the evening and the return flight is crazy early in the morning. We're probably going to end up on UA instead. It's an unfortunate and natural consequence of UA having triple the domestic share at SFO of AS + VX combined.

nomad420

+1
I have posted previously that the AS VX merger for me is a game changer. But yes I as well have run into limited flights to my destination cities and often at less desirable times (at least for me). Having said this I am really pushing to make AS/VX work for me and break away from UA.

dmach

Indeed...as two of my more frequently traveled routes are SFO-EWR and SFO-IAD (occasionally DCA), it does make it quite a bit more challenging to get just the right flight time on AS/VX. 3-4x per day vs 9-17x per day...yeah. Many of the new routes are only 1x daily, so they're better than nothing, but still not the be-all, end-all.

I've been less active on FT than in the past to begin with, and I'm new to the AS forum...so my apologies for missing things posted earlier! But yes, I'd like to make it work too, even if mine will be more adding to the mix and shifting rather than totally breaking away.

Thanks, both!

Kay_nyc

How long has it been taking to get matched recently? I'm flying a trans-con on October 11, and I have a trip to Alaska in the summer of 2018. I'm thinking of requesting the match on October 1 so it's good through next year, but I'm not sure if it would go through quickly enough to for the 10/11 flight.

milypan

It would be close buy my guess is you'd make it. I requested a match for my wife earlier this year, and the processing time was consistent with whatever has been reported earlier in this thread over the past couple years.

pushmyredbutton

I'm cautiously optimistic, as I have some AS/LATAM flights Oct 14th, and I'll be applying for a status match on Oct 1st.