Hey all,
please move if something exists, search function did not enlight me.

Question: If I were Gold until the 31st of May, I would have enough XP now to reach "Platinum" soon. (planable, and here is the issue)
I will have a flight on 31st of March, which would bring me the 300XP for Platinum, but I was thinking of waiting with that flight till April, to have a month more on the Status period.
If I do not credit the flight, do another one in April to "upgrade", and reclaim the XP in April: Would this still bring my new membership until 04/2027 for Platinum, or will they change it back?

Might I totally oversee something with the validity and I know, its just 30 days, but sometimes they matter.

Thanks!

This is one of those super-specific things that I don't think anyone will have a solid answer for. So please try it and report back!

Be the data point you want to see.

I'm in almost the exactly the same situation (Gold to Platinum), except my qualification period ends in April.

From what I gather, if you simply credit your flight in April, it will still count for March and your Platinum will be valid through March 2027. The only question I couldn't answer is what happens if you don't credit the March flight, then credit another flight taken in April, bumping yourself to Platinum until April 2027 and only then request credit for the March flight. I'd expect them to not deduct a month from the status you already earned until 04/27, but whether they'd add XP to the the 2027/28 counter is questionable.

No data points from me though, I decided to play it safe and credited a flight to SAS instead to avoid upgrading FB status too early. Part of the motivation to do it was that you can't really use some benefits (e.g. baggage) without having FFN attached to the booking, so if I wanted to employ the strategy above, I'd have to pay for my bag which would cost more than the value of status for month.

They won't.

The XPs will be added with an effective date of the date of the flight - i.e. they will count with a date of 31 March and therefore cannot belong to the current, on-going new Platinum year which will already have started at some April date in advance of the OP claiming for these XPs.

I know this the hard way. I refrained from buying SAF for a return ticket for which the outbound was my final flight of one particular membership year, and the inbound flight was the first flight of my subsequent membership year - I had already reached my maximum XP rollover, so didn't need/want the XPs to count for the year in which I took the outbound flight.

I paid for SAF in advance of boarding the inbound flight - my first flight of my new membership year - but the XPs were still associated with the date of the outbound (which I found unfair). Those XPs were then "lost" to me as they counted for the previous, now-ended year, and for which I had already received the maximum allowed rollover (300XP)

It's not - strictly speaking - a matter of "deducting a month". The new Platinum period will always last for 12 months (plus whatever period runs from the date of the flight that upgraded you to the end of that calendar month). That they make a retrospective decision to change the date when the upgrade in status happened - and therefore change the dates of that new Platinum year - doesn't actually mean that they deduct a month from the status, though clearly in this case the expiry date of the status would move by a month, indeed.

This is the problem - we don't know exactly how the system would handle this. I would expect it's automated to correct for such instances and that the membership year dates would be recalculated (if you were sitting down to design an algorithm to encode the process of handling status upgrades, rollovers, etc, it's the only logical outcome)

To be fair, this is not inconsistent with crediting on the activity date (which for SAF on a roundtrip is the outbound) and recalculating the rollover (which in OP's case would be as good as crediting it to the next year), as in your case recalculation would have been indistinguishable from not recalculating.

Well, at the risk of going well off-topic, because the SAF donation actually has little or nothing to do with the flights, then the "activity date" should never be the date of an outbound flown without making a donation in the previous year, when instead you wait for the inbound and accept one of the lower donation amounts for the inbound flight only instead the following year.

(If you do not accept any of the SAF options ahead of the outbound, which are priced up to account for both outbound and inbound, you are presented with a new, lower, set of SAF options ahead of the inbound, priced up to account only for the upcoming flight)

But FB follows your logic on this.

I'm accepting it as given that "any SAF purchased on a roundtrip is recorded as activity on the outbound" without regard for whether there's any rational basis for that practice (I suppose it's ultimately imposing a light tax on trying to optimize XP earning by nudging folks so inclined toward one-ways and award flights; I guess it's plausible that this is a consequence of Mr. Lipsey being someone who understands the game).