Hello all. I have read recently about the 90 day AA challenge and something about a UA challenge. Are there more? I am thinking that I wouldn't be the only one interested in a thread that lists all the different challenges available with bullet points for the requirements (such as flying on partners is allowed or not).

Thanks for any who can help with this!

Oddly enough, a search in each airline forum for "Challenge" or "Status Match" will get you the information you're looking for. In addition, many of the airline forums have a sticky at the top for frequently asked questions that also contains the information you're looking for.

Incredibly cleaver sarcasm aside , I think putting all of these into a single thread would be very useful for many people.

Since you only have a handful of posts, I didn't know if you knew that the information you're looking for is already easily available in FlyerTalk.

Feel free.

It may be available, but not easily. Those searches come up with many (over 9000!!) threads mostly unrelated. It would have taken little effort to at least mention a few airlines that you know of that are doing this, rather than a snide comment. I had every intention of consolidating the results of this thread into a single informative one so future searchers wont have to wade through. Using the combined knowledge of the heard is much more efficient than poking around old threads that may not be relevant any longer.

Exactly as it should be.

If you do an advanced search for "Challenge", searching the titles only, it returns 500 threads. On quick glance only 100 of them are from the last 6 months. Out of those 100 you can probably eliminate at least 50% of them by reading that the title pertains to some other meaing of "challenge". That leaves you with only 50 or so threads to read through, start skimming them till you find the important ones and you could probably knock out that amount of work in an hour or two.

A search for Challenge on the wiki returns only one page:

http://flyerguide.com/wiki/index.php/Challenge

with lots of details.

i agree.

i do not know if any other airlines have challenges but i have experience with the platinum challenge from aa. in my case, the platinum challenge i completed led to american awarding me with exec plat status well before i completed the required 100k points (back then it was only points that qualified you for exec plat).

i had been a fiercely loyal 1k mm flyer with ua. but in early 1999 i finally reached the end of my rope with them and in a fit of anger called the aa plat desk and asked the aa agent what she could do to help me transition to her airline. she said that she would elevate my status to gold imediately and if i earned 10,000 points in the next 90 days that aa would award me with platinum status. the entire process took about 2 minutes. after the conversation with her i remember being very impressed with how easy and fast the process was (no putting me on hold, no transferring my call, no faxes). it was so easy that i worried that the agent hadn't done it correctly, didn't know what she was talking about that i really wasn't registered and that this platinum challenge would never happen (clearly i was suffering from shell-shock from dealing with ua's incompetence for too long). but sure enough, as soon as i completed the 10,000 points (it took me 2 weeks) i promptly received my plat credentials. i continued flying on aa intending to complete the 100k points required to become exec plat.

approx 3 months later (i think i had completed about 60,000 total points by then) i received a call from an extremely polite person at aa advising me that "american has made an exception and effective immediately" elevated my status to exec platinum which would be valid until end of feb, 2001. what is interesting is that they did this completely of their own accord (never in my conversations with aa had i requested exec plat status). aa had obviously continued to track my travel patterns after i completed the platinum challenge.

this was back in 1999 and before all the service cuts but my experience points out that american really does track your travel after you request a challenge and how this might benefit you.