jasons2e

That's funny, since so many people have been Platinum on KLM with only making a single trip on KLM

jasons2e

Would it be possible to take a minimal amount of miles and transfer it in and out of AA so many times that it appears you earned 2 million miles and achieve their plat status without really earning many AA miles?

johnep1

Not unless you found a way to transfer between programs without losing any value.

richarddd

If you use miles for award travel, lifetime miles don't decrease. Do lifetime miles decrease when you transfer to another program? Do lifetime miles increase when you transfer from another program?

gunn

What I believe he's stating is that, for example, while you can transfer from
AA -> HH at a 1:2 ratio
5K AAmi -> 10K HHpts

you lose value when you try to go back.
10K HHpts -> 1.5K AAmi

AA -> HH -> AA
1 -> .3

If you just wanted to get lifetime gold and wanted to burn miles, by my rough est. you'd have to burn 540K miles and continue laundering them back and forth to get to ~1M lifetime AA (this is a pure est done in 3 min w/ excel).

Worth it? Probably not.
--
Even if you use the HH pts to redeem for flights, you still lose:
50K AAmi -> 100K HHpts
100K HHpts -> 1 free coach ticket in US on AA

That same coach ticket would only have cost 25K AAmi directly, so you are in essence losing 50% of the value.

This of course, doesn't do anything for increasing your lifetime miles.

pinniped

To answer the other question: when you redeposit an award, the system is "smart" enough to know not to credit the redeposit towards lifetime status.

This is a good thing: if AA's IT department couldn't make this happen correctly, they'd kill the Lifetime Status program very quickly.

Not that I'd recommend it, but if you were *close* to 1MM or 2MM, you can convert out AA to Diner's, and then back at a 44% rate (45.6% if you value the residual points left in DC). Max 50K miles out (22K miles back in) per calendar year.

Edited to add that you can pay Diner's Club a fee to make it a 2:1 conversion. 50K AA -> 50K DC -> 25K AA, if you pay the fee. Otherwise, it's 50K AA -> 50K DC -> 22K AA, with something like 1800+ DC points left over.

[This message has been edited by pinniped (edited Jan 23, 2004).]

richarddd

If you're losing miles on the round trip, it's likely a bad idea. Will anyone let you do 1:1?

jasons2e

Can you get close to 1:1 with any points.com trades? The options I saw were pretty bad. Any other round trip tranfer options that would be close to 1:1?

Airbornecic

what about Amex or Diners deposits into a AA acount? Would they count?

aafreq

Many used the "valuemags" promotion a couple of years ago to get the AA lifetime status.

Can anyone elaborate on this topic???

paradocs

Others may chime in with more details but basically what happened was Valuemags.com offered around 400 Raddison Goldpoints per dollar purchased. I think an inexperienced marketing person at valuemags didn't realize that this was a ridiculous offer that was a windfall for the magazine consumer. Others here may remember the real reasons.

It was big news on FT and many jumped in and bought tons of magazines. Everyone in my family, friends, office got magazine subscriptions for gifts that Christmas. I forget the ratio of goldpoints to miles. But, I think the 400 on a dollar earned about 125 miles. As I recall valuemags tried to get out of the deal, but we held them accountable and I think most of us got our miles.

At the same time hallmark.com did a similar thing through goldpoints. I bought lots of gift certificates for places I would normally shop or eat. It was one very exciting time here on Flyertalk!!!

RS

My wife hit 1,000,000 3 weeks ago and received lifetime Gold status and 8 e-upgrades already.

I hit 2,000,000 last year and received lifetime Plat status and 4 VIPOWs. I also got 2 Plat luggage tags.

You get a new card with the 1M or 2M miles printed on it and a booklet explaining Gold or Plat benefits.

Others have posted about benefits at million mile increments above this but they seem to vary over time.

[This message has been edited by RS (edited Jan 26, 2004).]

Neal

I had just under 1,000,000 AA points when the Goldpoints/Valumag promo started. I spent $7600 get to 2MM (Lifetime Platinum.) But the price in terms of aggravation was even higher.

The response to the promo was so overwhelming, Goldpoints was "snowed under" and had a tremendous mess on their hands. This promo had to cost them millions considering all the miles they gave away. They tried to find any way they could to cheat people out of their miles. For example, many of us received a 15% discount on each magazine order by putting in a coupon code of some sort. Originally, some "early birds" got the miles on the full dollar amount even though they paid 15% less. (I believe they called first and verified it to be true.) But after the bulk of the orders came in, Goldpoints stopped this practice. As a result, I was about 100,000 miles short of the 2MM Lifetime Platinum and made up the difference with Hilton and Starwood points among other things.

Because of the huge amount of orders, Goldpoints was extremely slow in posting points. When we called their CS nobody could give us any straight answers. They kept promising "by the end of the week" the points will post. In reality it took months. They tried screwing me out of a couple hundred thousand points. I was on the phone with them numerous times until they realized I was right. Many others complained of getting screwed too.

It was well worth it once the dust settled. We received something like 113 miles per dollar spent. But what a mess!!


[This message has been edited by Neal (edited Jan 26, 2004).]

pinniped

Not under normal circumstances. Perhaps if Diner's ever ran a BA-like promotion with AA, you could get 50,000 miles in at 1:1. But typically, double-conversions result in a loss of value. Otherwise, things would be so easy that AA would have to modify their existing Lifetime status rules.

pinniped

Yes, they count towards lifetime miles. About 175,000 of my lifetime AA miles came from other program transfers. (Namely, Diner's and Marriott.)

I forget if my TWA miles counted. I only had a few thousand of those actually sitting in my account at the time of the merger so I didn't pay a whole lot of attention.