I have the elite tier status with the UA version of iDine, but this AA 250 per dine promo is intriguing... Would love to do it but would not love to miss out on the diff of 7 MPD that would be significant in the end.. do you know if they'll give you elite in another program if you're already elite in one?

Sorry, but you have to earn elite dining status one-partner-at-a-time.

No, but:

1. Even if you were elite, if you were mostly dining at just above $15 on your near future dines, to get the 250 mile bonus, keep in mind that bonus would be signifantly bigger than "normal" 150ish mile earnings from the dines.

2. There's more than just the 250 miles per dine. If you get $150 in spending on mile-earning dines in ANY month, as an AA elite (AAdvatnage Gold, Plat, or ExecPlat), you get a 500 mile bonus for the month (two or three months later).

3. Are you sure you're not elite? If so, you must not have dined much at all with AAdvantage Dining in the last couple years. There were some other airlines' iDine programs where I intentionally dined little in the first part of this year to see what non-elite status would work out to, but they made me elite anyway based on dining I'd done in early 2004!

Anyway, there's no better time to work your way up to elite than during such a bonus period, as (if your dines are $15ish to $25ish, at least) the bonus will "more than" make up the "missing" 7 MPD.

And keep in mind that the number of 250 mile bonus (through the end of October) is unlimited (as long as you watch out for 1/month restaurants), unlike the UA version of the bonus. So you may be able to get to elite in the middle of this bonus period and keep going.

You may also want to do the math to figure out if "mini" dines are more worth it to you than bonus-qualifying dines to get to elite. Theoretically you could get to elite quickly by buying a couple-dollar coffee/soft drink/whatever a day at an "unlimited visits" restaurant. On such low-amount "dines", you hardly get anything anyway (besides getting to elite), so the low MPD shouldn't hurt. (Whether you can make this work depends on whether an "unlimited dines" iDine restaurant where you can buy a cheap item every day (or even more than once a day?*) is convenient to you.

*If buying something there more than once a day, make sure the credit card amount is slightly different, so iDine doesn't think they got a duplicate of the same dine.