Profpunce

In April this year we moved as a family from Australia to Hong Kong. Of course much to work through with any such move but one of the top priorities was finding my new airline and building status as quickly as possible. In Australia I exclusively flew Qantas and was a PlatinumOne member. So my starting point was an email to the Marco Polo Club to see if they would consider a status match. I knew it was complicated with both airlines being OneWorld members so no real surprise when they came back and said they would just be offering me silver status. So that was the starting point and I then moved all my travel to Cathay. In May I hit the 600 Club Points required for Gold. With that the points get reset to Zero and then last week I hit the 1200 Club Points required for Diamond. And yes again they get reset to Zero. I have to say the reset of Club Points and the start of a new renewal date isn’t really a feature that makes sense to me! Either way I’ve been pretty happy with Cathay, the product is very strong and I would argue beats Qantas. The only difference is I do miss Qantas P1, their proactive support was incredible. Where to from here who knows…I’ve accumulated 1800Club points in 4months and have a calendar packed with equal amounts of travel for the rest of the year…Let’s see if I get to that mysterious, secret world with no clear rules of qualification that is Diamond Plus….

Arbeysix

As a fellow Asia based expat I completely agree with you. For all of its current woes Cathay whips QF across most key parameters. If you think CX is tough on QF status check out how QF treats CX FFs...Last time I checked MPC accrual from flights on QF metal was appalling...

sxc

@Profpunce welcome to the board.

ermen

I prefer the food and drinks on QF
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iansh

And no lifetime status with CX.

sxc

Profpunce

All good points. That said when it comes to food, drink, lifetime status etc i can live what that. The only thing which im really missing is P1. Having a dedicated service desk who monitor your travel and step in whenever there is an issue is amazing and I wish I had something similar for Cathay. With Qantas its straightforward - hit 3600 Status credits and you get P1. Its frustrating not knowing with Cathay if you'll ever get there or not....would be great if they actually put a target in place. To answer your question SXC I travel long haul in J most weeks - mainly between London, US and Australia..

christep

I thought the target for Diamond Plus is more or less defined as being in the top 1% of Diamonds by expenditure (not Club Points)? There has been some discussion here previously as to what that translated to in dollars; from memory it was thought to be about US$250,000 a year.

If you're flying business class why did you feel the need to transfer out of Qantas P1? Couldn't you maintain that flying a mix of CX and QF? (Sorry - not familiar with P1)

QRC3288

You could hit it a lot faster if you're flying Australia to Europe, or outports to Europe / USA. Definitely harder ex-Hong Kong. But not THAT bad anymore if you're flying J or F regionally. They've bumped up the earning regionally so it's fairly straightforward...if you spend money in J and F, you're going to get decent status.

edit: I see already posted!

As for your travel patterns, yikes that sounds bad mate!

About not knowing, it's not that "unknown". You need to spend at least 80k USD a year to be in the conversation, and realistically 100k on CX / KA metal only (other OW doesn't count). It depends on the year but generally 250k would be more than enough as implied below, and 100k would be on the lower side. You can get part of the fight done just by figuring how much you / your employer is spending. If your employer is big that might be hard, because there's a chance they're paying significantly discounted rates for your fare classes. Very easy to calculate if it's out of your pocket.

It is top 1% of Diamonds roughly speaking, by spend. Correct, not Club Points.

I think 250k is on the high side, but ballpark.

ermen

yikes that it some serious flying!

on a separate note did you ever considered switching over to BAEC?

with your flying pattern you can easily make Concorde Room / Gold Guest List which gives you the ability to gift elite status (1 x emerald + 2 x sapphire) to friends / family. you should also get plenty of upgrade vouchers for use on BA metal which could help you get into F if you take BA going to Europe. only drawback now is that the burning on CX metal has taken a hit which is a bit of an inconvenience being based in HKG!

LuoboTiX

Actually if you book enough CX business class flights in advance (>6 segments, preferrably 8) and then requested the status match before the actual flight, considering your QF Platinum One status, it's possible according to relevant record this year, that you would be offered a straight match to Gold after you completed for example 2 segments of them. Anyway you could make it easily by yourself, just for your information.

Profpunce

Thanks for this. When I first moved I thought quite a bit about who I wanted to sign up with. As much as I like qantas they just weren't going to work for any flights other than back to Oz (due to poor earning rates when flying on OW partners). I thought about BA and AA but in the end went with the home airline as I have always liked cathay. I guess what I'm looking at now kind of comes back to the earlier point. Yes it sounds like we know cathay give DM+ to the top 1% but I like having a known target that I can hunt down. I could give cathay a huge amount business and then just fly short as others have flown even more. One option could be now to do just enough to keep diamonds with cathay or get to the 1800 mark to get all of the extra bonuses and then use BA the rest of the time...decisions decisions

Profpunce

Damn, if only I had known this back in April. Oh well!