Valveking

I received an offer to buy up to Platinum. Will the $200 Amex credit work to cover part of this? Thanks

TXSundevil

Logged on today to ask this very question. Out of curiosity, did AA quote you $ 495 for Gold and $ 1095 for Plat?

Hopefully someone can help us out.

JJeffrey

I would suggest searching and/or asking in the dedicated AA credit thread on the Amex forum:

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/american-express-membership-rewards/2002976-airline-fee-250-200-100-reimbursement-reports-aa-only-2020-21-a.html

Valveking

They quoted $800 for plat

TXSundevil

Interesting. And I checked the other thread pointed out by the prior post and sounds like we are good to go for reimbursement.

VegasGambler

Does anyone else notice that AA is offering to sell status for extremely low prices? There have been reports of people with no or minimal status being offered EXP for $2500.

With UA I'm Plat and their offer for me to buy up to 1k was just short of $10,000.

TXSundevil

I'm Plat right now but AA just made major changes to their program. Status can be gained by CC spend, so it'll be interesting to see if status is even worth it.

lowfareair

I think it is the other way around - UA's price is extremely high. Assuming you retained Plat and just made it over the PQP threshold, they want twice the price of just buying/flying enough plane tickets to get to 1K for you to get nothing more than a bump to 1K (no miles, no flights, etc. as part of the $10k)

Contrast that with how people can qualify with Loyalty Points in the new scheme. I'm not going to waste space guessing what their margins are for an EXP (and I'm sure it is a crazy broad range), so look at someone doing it on pure credit card spend: $200k spend on an AA card gets EXP. Let's assume this person is using some bonus categories and earns an average of 1.25 RDM/$ on top of the 1 Loyalty Point (are we calling them LPs yet?) per dollar. That means $200k gets them 250k miles and EXP status. I've heard AA makes about 1.2cpp selling miles to banks, so this customer will net AA $3000 for EXP status BUT they are also on the hook for 250,000 miles that could be redeemed for trips and other stuff.

$2500 seems pretty high compared to that, especially when AA has no miles or flights to include and the only direct cost that doesn't require the customer to purchase flights is the CC processing fee for the $2500.

VegasGambler

There was no "retaining" -- everyone's status was extended for free. This is just my status earned in 2019 that's been extended through covid.

In fairness my AA status was extended with $15k in CC spend so it's not that different.

lowfareair

Even still, UA is charging 2/3 of what is required to achieve 1K entirely from BIS. That BIS 1K also will get a minimum of 121k redeemable miles and United has to fly them on all of the flights that they dropped $15k for. Again, it sounds like United is the crazy expensive one for it based on how much gross profit they'd earn from a member earning it the hard way vs simply buying it.

VegasGambler

Well, it's more about having it this year. I could earn it this year but then I wouldn't get the status until (probably) near the end of this year, and all of next year.

It's the same with AA. It doesn't matter what you could have done last year ... if you didn't, then this is your chance to get it right now.

Personally I think that $2000 or $2500 for EXP is not a bad deal, even if it does not come with SWUs, especially if you are currently statusless. If I was a frequent AA traveler who took 2 years off because of covid and missed the promos, and was therefore currently statusless, and was planning on resuming my frequent travel this year, I would probably either take that deal, or really rush to abuse the hell out of the shopping portal. Traveling with no status for a year does not appeal to me.

Fly2Connect

I have no recent DP, but as of January 2020 it was indeed crediting automatically for status buyups. Charged $495 to my HH Aspire and got a $250 credit back for buying up.