PhilH

I've just got my new Blue Plus card as I didn't get enough miles last year to renew Silver. However, in with letter welcoming me to this new status is an offer to renew my Silver status immediately for £150. Where was this offer last year when I dropped down from Gold?

I'm pretty sure it's not worth it. I hardly fly with bmi, and it's only lounge access and 25% miles bonus we're talking about. However, there's a certain charitable part of my brain which wants to reward bmi for:

- Comping me from BA Gold in the first place
- Providing what is clearly the best value FF programme in the world, period

Plus there's always the possibility that I may get a business trip or two which would yield significant *A miles. If I'm already Silver then that makes potential Gold a much more realistic prospect.

Does anyone have any other thoughts?

PS: The form says "Return to: Joanna *****, diamond club"... is this our very own Joanna?

Internaut

Renewing Gold for a price would be difficult as I would imagine there would be partner issues. Depending on your travel patterns, this might not be a bad offer at all (and as you say, a couple of unexpected long haul biz trips on *A and suddenly you're pushing gold).

ajamieson

To answer your last question: yes

As for renewal, I think the only value of the £150 is that it gives you a head start at gold in the event you find yourself ticketed on *A in the next 12 months. You've already got BA gold if you need lounge acess on a domestic flight.

Raffles

I got LH's 'renew your Gold card for 1 year for just Euro 2,000' letter recently. Somehow I managed to turn it down.

What really got me was that if you earn status you get it for 2 years - the least they could do is give you paid status for 2 years.

My BA comp has now got me 4 years of LH status - 2 as SEN and now 2 at FLT, expiring 2/10. Amazing.

ambrogz

if you think that nextyear you will be able to get enough points to become gold i think 150 gbp is worth it otherwise I would forget it

note that gold bmi is a gold star alliance which has great advantages all over the world ( you know that having a gold one world card)

Club_IC

I can totally understand your decision in relation to €2,000 euro for a gold card renewal.

However, can I confirm that LH were willing to do a comp status from BA Gold? Do you know if they will do this from any other airline (e.g. Sky Team, Flying Blue)?

Thanks for your feedback.

frankvb

AFAIK LH never do a status match. But a few years ago there was a *A-wide 'official' status match offer, I guess that's what Raffles did. I should have done the same then, if I had only found FT by then I wouldn't have had my status matched to BMI

Raffles

Star Alliance did it about 3 years ago for UK residents. They also did it 4-5 years before that. You could be comped to any *A airline you wanted, but the reason most FT'ers went for LH is that you got Gold for 2 years (actually, almost 3 years as you get status for 2 years from the following February and the promo ran in Spring)

You didn't need to know about FT, though. It was advertised in the press and on billboards!

My gut feeling is that it will be run again soon. Why?
a) Open Skies means that the new carriers on the TATL runs will want to attract pax from BA, and
b) Those of us who got LH Gold in Mar / Apr 2005 will drop down to LH Silver at the end of Feb 2008. They may be keen to get us back to Gold.

jbfield

So now would be a good time to comp from BMI *G to a non-*G (e.g. EK) ready for a future comp from that non-*A to LH *G ?

RAPC

Except don't the airlines doing the comping usually require details of what you have earned to achieve status? That part may be a problem if you are trying to earn a comp from a comp.

Jetstreamer

But which carriers comp BD Gold? Are you saying EK do? Anyone else?

frankvb

Agreed, I picked this up from the LU billboards. But I didn't know LH provided 2 years of status, so I just went with BMI (on which I had already collected a few miles). That's where the FT knowledge would have come in handy

And it would be nice to be able to do the LH trick if they are going to run this again.

jbfield

Oh, I hadn't consdered that aspect....I was thinking there were others as easy as BD. (Not having ever status matched before I'm not that familiar with the process except the threads I've read here).
It was just hypotetical; I don't know if EK do or don't, but surely someone must match them...?

florian

Hi,

I read somewhere in the past that there was a way of keeping Silver status if you haven't requalified for Silver.
I was wondering if that's still possible?

Greets,

Florian

GoldCircle

I've merged the thread. /mod/

And yes, this is still available.