Using Credit Card to Gain ELITE status?
 

Hi All,

First post, so be kind..

Are there any credit cards out there that I could use to gain a Elite/Platinum/Gold/Diamond type status with the airlines or hotels through the actual accrual of points or some other way?

Thanks

Welcome to FT!

Air France KLM American Express Silver and Gold. Only for French residents.

http://www.airfrance.fr/FR/fr/common...rican_gold.htm

I went from AA lifetime Gold to lifetime Platinum by using the Citibank credit card. I have flown less than 200,000 miles on AA since joining their FF program.

Thanks Nomad! Je parle fracais [a little], mais je n'habite pas en France. Just Missouah hah.

Welcome to FT!

If you qualify for AmEx Centurion and don't mind the four-figure annual fee, it comes with elite status in a few airlines and hotel chains. See the AmEx forums here and/or its Web site for details.

Ditto for the Merrill Lynch MERRILL+ Visa card once you reach a certain level (I forget exactly, it's in five figures) of annual use. Again, see the appropriate forum here or the firm's Web site.

There's a Hilton card that will give you Silver or Gold, and also I think you can get status with Starwood.

United has a card that will give you some EQMs - not enough, but it would get you started.

And a Marriott CC that will give u immediate Silver status + free night, points, etc.

Amex Plat only has a three figure annual fee and it gives you Gold *wood status; Priority Club status can be achieved through any deposit of points in your PC account, even transfers.

Delta Skymiles Plat ($150 annual fee) gives 5,000 Delta points upon sign-up plus 20,000 EQMs if you spend $50k in a calendar year. That's enough for status on Delta.

Welcome to FT! The Starwood Amex gives you Preferred Plus status automatically and upgrades you to Gold status if you have at least $30K of net spending in a calendar year (January - December).

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry8703e/4.1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/104)

The Hilton HHonors Amex will get you HHonors Gold VIP status with $20,000 in annual spend charged to the card. Card holders also qualify for the special AXON award: four nights at the top category Hilton properties for 125,000 HHonors points.

Southwest Airlines will give you a Companion Pass if you accrue 100 credits within a 12-month period. Many people use credit card bonuses and spending to put them over the top.

Does the Hilton HHonors Citi Visa also grant you Gold status for 20k in spending?

Both the MC and Visa for US Airways get you 10,000 toward preferred status (not actual miles...just credited toward preferred) when you spend over 25,000 in a calendar year. So for spending 75,000 in a year you get Silver which is pretty much worthless unless you just like boarding early.

Citi Chairman - Hilton Gold
Continental President's Card - Hyatt midtier + spending is eligible to count as EQMs

No, only the HHonors Amex gives the Gold for spending $20,000. Both the HHonors Amex and Visa will grant you silver upon getting the card, but Silver isn't worth much with Hilton.

Can you get AA gold from having no status with the Citibank card? How much spending is required?

AA gives lifetime Gold for one million total lifetime miles, lifetime Platinum for two. All miles from all sources, including credit card spending, count - so it's $1M or $2M if you have no other miles from any source at all. However, if you have no status, you can earn a maximum of 60K to 100K miles per year from a card, so it can take a very long time to reach Gold that way unless you have more than one credit card (does this work, or are they onto this loophole?) or earn some of your miles from other sources (like, f'rinstance, actually flying). Once you hit 1MM and earn Gold the limit goes away, so you can get from Gold to Platinum in a hurry if you spend fast enough.

If you earn using the SPG Amex, you can transfer points to AA miles and not only get around that cap, but get a 25% bonus on transfers in 20K blocks.

I've got 60k AA points from citi credit card (in last 6 months or so), but I have zero qualifying points.

Am I missing somthing?

Yes.

Your credit card miles do not earn EQMs (elite qualifying miles) so you still need to fly 25K EQMs for Gold status. AA only counts actual flight miles (and class-of-service bonuses) towards qualifying for annual status, hence the acronym EQM.

However, your credit card miles DO count towards the 1M lifetime miles needed for lifetime AA Gold status. AA counts ALL miles earned in your account towards the lifetime status, no matter how you earned them.

Priority Club Visa, 60k points in one year will get you Plat.

I now understand. Thanks:)

Come to think of it, the same way of getting around the annual cap (but with no bonus, except for occasional promos) should work with Diners Club too. DC, thanks to their deal with MasterCard, is accepted in many places that AmEx-branded cards aren't.

(And thanks to Boraxo for a very clear explanation of that other bit.)

True, though then you're also hit with the DC transfer fee.

Two other ways around it:

(1) Get multiple Citi cards - the annual cap is per card. If you churn cards, you could hit 1M in about two years just from the bonuses.
(2) Sign up for the gold or plat challenge on AA and do a mileage run. It'll give your friends and family the opportunity to think you're a little weird.

How soon soon would you like the status, what do you want from the status, and how much credit card spend do you do per (month or year) average that you could steer to this/these card(s)?

The reason for these followup quesitons is that the answer is often "yes, but unless you have high spending all the time it may not be a good way to do it".

For example, Priority Club gives you Gold status at 20k points no matter how you earn them, and Platinum status at 60k points no matter how you earn them. But to earn them through a credit card, you've got to put many tens of thousands of dollars on it. On the other hand, if you go to the Priority Club forum and pay attention to the "bonus offers" sticky, you'll find that there are so many promos you can register for that run concurrently that many people get Gold status after just a few nights and Platinum status after less than a dozen stays early in the year (even at inexpensive properties), so what's the point of wiating until you've spend tens of thousands of dollars to do it by credit card spending? And Platinum at Priority Club gets you even more points (so free stays quickly), but is not as reliable at upgrades as, say HHonors Gold, and does not get you free breakfast and other similar perks the way HHonors Gold. But OTOH HHonors runs (untargeted) promos very rarely, so if that's the program you want, the credit card route might be relatively better there.

If you live somewhere where AA works for you as well as any other airline, then I'd say that's the long term holy grail, because it's the only airline where you can get lifetime elite status through any kind of mileage earning (including credit cards). And once you earn them, you can even use them for things like hotel stays (if you don't need all those miles for flights), since it's how many miles you earned, not your balance, that matters toward lifetime status. But it doesn't earn you any status (if you're not qualifying by flying) at all until you get to 1 million lifetime earned miles, at which point you're suddenly AAdvantage Gold for life.

By the way, the way to earn miles through credit cards at AA is not to use one (unless you've got a lot of credit card spend a year, as in six digits at least), but rather to "churn" them. Unlike Chase, Citi still allows churning, and allows you to apply for 2 cards every 60 days, and right now lots of cards give 15k to 25k bonuses for $250 to $750 in purchases during the first few months, with first year annual fee waived. So apply, purchase, cancel, lather, repeat, and you get way more miles than you'd ever get from spending alone if you only have five digits of spending you can put on a card per year.

Completely opposite is United, where you can "pre-buy" status for a year by paying a lot up front, and then what you've paid up front can be used to pay for flights for the rest of the year. But if you only want inexpensive domestic flights, you're likely to lose a lot on this.

Finally, bear this in mind: Status is fairly usless on an airline you're not going to fly much, or at a hotel chain you're not going to stay in much. And there are other ways to "bootstrap yourself" into status, like Challenges at AA, and status match at some other airlines or some hotel chains. Few credit cards will get you status quickly.

And remember, with the exception of lifetime status, all status has to be requalified for every year, with limited exceptions like "soft landings" (drop only one status level a year) at some programs. So if it takes you much more than a year of credit card use to get enough points to earn status, that may not help you consistently!

Inasmuch as the OP's profile includes ...

[Screw you AAdvantage!]

... I daresay s/he is not interested in advice on obtaining lifetime status on American Airlines ;) . Of course the thread should still include such information for others who are interested in the same proposition.

Hahah Indeed. Thats there because a bunch of miles had expired on me, I received no notice that it was going to happen, etc. etc... there was a good period when I was not doing any travel. Now things are a little different, I am willing to consider going back to AA - if the reasons are right.

As for churning cards and whatnot... how does that effect one's credit score? Negatively? No? Explain please :)

Not signifcantly. A teeny bit nagetively, but in general worth worrying about if you've otherwise got good credit. Ie, it might drop you ten or twenty points temporarily, but not cumulatively, since it'll only be affected at most by the last few months of churning at any time. (And thus if you keep churning, it'll level out, and if you decide to stop churning, the tiny negative effect will go away soon thereafter, all other things being equal.)

Your credit score is much more affected by your ratio of total credit available to total credit used, your on-time payment and always paying at least $1 more than the minimum (since they have a flag which simply say's "piad minimum" vs "paid more than minimum")*, the age of your credit history (thus cancel your most recently acquired cards, and never cancel cards you've had for decades).

And note that the latter point fits in perfectly with churning! In churning, you're cancelling the cards after you get the bonus, so you're cancelling new cards with little credit history, and thus it hurts your credit score neglibly.

Thus that only teeny negative dip on your credit score is going to be from the recent inquiry count.

And meanwhile, if you don't have much credit available at Citi now but they give you a bunch on your first card or two, then that aspect raises your credit score, so in that case it may balance out or even go net positive! But if you already have several cards with high credit available at Citi, they'll likely just shuffle that available creidt around into the new cards you apply for.

*For value reasons, of course, you always want to pay the balance in full every month. But from a credit score standpoint, all that matters is that it be at least $1 more than the minimum every month so that it's not flagged as "just the minimum", and that you keep the total balance on your cards low compared to the total credit available.

Don't forget that there are many cash back cards that give you cash. If you're not flying enough to get elite status then elite status really doesn't matter much. If you spend a significant amount, it will pay for some long flights where you'll earn a ton of miles...probably enough for status.

Interesting stuff there about the credit cards, scores, etc.

Right now, I have none [by choice]. I want to start with an American Express - I want to be paying off the balance every month. I am still in school, btw.

I would prefer to not have the annual fee.. but would be willing to pay one.


At this point I am looking to go with a Gold or Classic Amex w/ Rewards.

Why would I be better off with the Hilton Cards, etc?

Thanks for the help.

Patrick

Oh.

Also interested in a Cash Back card... like BlueCash? Why that over a AmEx rewards card? Is a 1% or so cash back typically better than Rewards points?

If you had both cards you would only earn 20,000 status points for anything over $50,000 (split evenly between the 2 cards) spend as far as I know (ie its not 10,000 status points per $25,000 spent, just 10,000 once you reach $25,000).

Pre-boarding is a poorly promoted benefit of holding the US Airways Mastercard (and possibly the visa) - so its sort of Status-Lite in that sense (there is some restriction about having to have you Dividend Miles number on the ticket/boarding pass for this to work, and of course its US operated flights only).

This only applies to the higher of the Mastercards and Visa's for US Airways - not the lower ranked ones.

Depending on who you fly with there may be some other options to get pseudo status, ie;

• Qantas Club members (including lifetime members) get lounge access with Qantas, AA, and BA + a seperate checkin line for domestic Qantas flights.
• United lets you buy Economy Plus access for the year which gives you access to the more roomy economy seats but not pre-boarding or lounge access.

Some credit cards still give out an annual lounge pass so you can visit once. (US Airways cards and some Australian issued Qantas cards do, not sure who else might still)

As mentioned before Amex Centurion gives status on a couple of Airlines (Continental being one which gives you status on Northwest and Delta flights as well) but you need to have spent at least $250,000 on your other Amex cards in the year before you apply and then you pay $2500 per year for the card so I doubt it's a good deal for anyone who doesn't fly enough to earn status from flying (that's a lot of mileage runs after all).

(Oh and don't forget, whatever card you get - don't forget to use an online loyalty program shopping mall whenever possible - airline or cashback like virtualdiscountcard.com - to get even more rewards.

If you travel at all, you get better returns, usually, from a rewards card than you would from 1% cash back. For me, if a ticket is < 400, I'll just pay for it, so my most recent use of miles was for a $600+ ticket. At 25,000 miles, that's better than 1% return and the ticket has more flexibility. Similar for hotel points. If you use reward points judiciously, you can do much better than 1% and sometimes better than 2%. I'm pretty sure there's a discussion of this in the credit card forums.

Another CC with Elite-Lite benefits is the Continental Airlines Presidential Plus Card (http://www.firstusa.com/cgi-bin/webc...cont&mkid=674L which offers Presidents Club (& NW & DL) access & Priority Boarding ( CO only - but not complimentary upgrades like real CO elites). You also get Hyatt Platinum.

Annual fee is $395 so may be worth it IF you have a home airport with a CO/NW club in the terminal you fly from but you actually fly other airlines (access does not require travel on CO or its partners - if you can get to the club you can use it) but not clubs of your actual airlines. For example - I am based in AUS an airport with exactly 2 clubs, CO & AA - I can access both (via NW & QF memberships) - I can only access the AA club if I am flying AA but can access CO if I am flying anything else - including Southwest (which I have been forced to do for work some times). Even when I have been flying international first class on United I have used to CO club since UA makes no accommodation in AUS.

This is a specific case where this card MAY be useful - in a lot of larger airports their are either more clubs, or different terminals which limit access.

Thanks for all the info, a lot of good stuff here :)

This thread is about gaining status from using (heavily) credit cards .

What fatfrog said. Since your new line of questions is about credit card per se, you should revisit those relevant threads in Credit Card Programs/Partners and join the discussion there. You will find ongoing discussion of all Amex cards and other credit cards (including cashbacks). Posting your questions in the right fora will get you faster responses and keep our fora less scattered. Especially for a student FTer, there are TONs of useful info in the credit card fora for you to learn and benefit from. :)

Welcome to FT!

you might want to go read my latest entry on BoardingArea:
http://boardingarea.com/blogs/onthefly/

I hint at a new Delta credit card coming soon that actually will allow credit card spend to earn complete elite status and the EQMs can also be gifted. Of course you have to buy the Crown Room lounge membership to go along ....

Hope this helps answer the question.

This whole thing about the credit cards and status is a little strange eve if it comes very handy sometimes.

Like if someone on DL is Platinum anyways but can gift 25k EQM to lets say his wife/daughter in order to get her Silver and be at least a little protected that could be fine.

However if I buy a lounge membership then I intend to fly regulary on that airline so that I would most likely gain status anyways.

These days the airfares are so cheap that it's really worth to draw the value out of the other vacation factor: Hotels :)

The SPG AMEX is unbeatable because of the SPG points value. I hate AMEX though...