Hi everyone.  This is just a short post to share my American Airlines AAdvantage Status Challenge with you.  I’ve gone from Platinum in 2015, to Gold in 2016 to nada this year.  I purposefully fell short of re-qualifying for Gold this year in hopes of doing this status challenge and now I’m $86 Elite Qualifying Dollars (EQDs) short of completing it thanks to just 1 flight purchased with my Citi Thank You Points.

This status challenge was not targeted.  I just called AAdvantage and asked them for a challenge so they offered me 2 different challenges, 1 for Gold and 1 for Platinum, each with the option to pay extra to have the status during the challenge.  Below is the breakdown of the 4 options that I had to choose from followed by my reasoning for the option that I chose.

I had 2 decisions to make.  The first was whether I wanted to challenge to Gold or Platinum Status.  The second was whether I wanted to pay extra to have the status during the challenge or only upon completion of the challenge.  The first decision was easy because I knew I’d be able to complete the Requirements of the Gold challenge with my flight to France, but I wouldn’t be able to fly an additional 5.5k EQMs or 8 segments and spend an additional $1,000 to get Platinum in the 3 month time frame.  The next decision required a few considerations surrounding my flight to France.

On a long-haul flight, especially an overnight one, I have to sit in a window seat.  There were no Main Cabin Extra window seats available, so the best I could hope for was a Preferred seat, which is complimentary with status, or $81 one-way without status.  The difference between Gold during and Gold upon completion is $180.  Selecting a preferred seat round-trip without status would cost $162.  So the last remaining question was: are the benefits of having Gold during the challenge worth $18?  (That’s $180-$162.)  Let’s break that down below.

I have a few American Airlines credits cards (from my Citi AAdvantage Platinum & Barclays Aviator Silver) that come with some of the same benefits that Gold status gets you.  Because of that, my first checked bag free doesn’t factor in here.  In addition, the difference between boarding with Gold members and boarding with Zone 5 credit card holders isn’t a big deal to me so I’m not factoring that in either.

So what’s left to consider?  I don’t care about priority check-in, and I don’t need priority security because I have TSA PreCheck.  Upgrades are not applicable for flights between the US and Europe, otherwise that would be my #1 consideration.  Gold status earns you 40% more redeemable miles so that could be worth $18.  The flight is going to earn me 4,620 redeemable miles, 6,468 with the 40% Gold bonus.  The additional 1,848 redeemable miles are definitely not worth $18.  Given all of the above considerations, I concluded that I would not pay extra to have status during the challenge.  If I had plans to fly on more paid flights within those 3 months, that might have swayed me, but at the time, I had no concrete plans.

There is 1 benefit of Gold status that I did not consider.  The $75 award processing charge if booking less than 21 days in advance is waived.  This year, I’ve made several award bookings less than 21 days prior to departure.  Because of that pesky $75 fee, I’ve been forced to use Alaska Airlines miles or British Airways Avios to book those award tickets.  I started the year with about a third the amount of both Alaska Airlines miles and British Airways Avios as I had in American Airlines miles and therefore would have much rather used American Airlines miles.  Based on how my year of award flight booking had gone thus far, I might have paid the extra $18 for Gold status during the challenge had I thought about the benefit of waived award processing fees.  As it turns out, I have yet to book an award flight for myself since I started the challenge and it’s looking like I won’t before the end of the challenge, so no harm no foul here.  I did book a flight last-minute for my friend Courtney to fly to Charlotte so we could drive together to Atlanta for a wedding, but she paid the $75 processing fee.

In conclusion, I booked my flight to France with 90k Citi Thank You Points which was the majority of my balance.  I did that intentionally as it was just before Citi Thank You Points were devalued.  The flight satisfied the EQM requirement but left me $86 shy of the EQD requirement, so I have to find and fly a cheap flight from Charlotte to anywhere that spans 0-1 nights by November 30 to complete this challenge.  I’ll be using the ITA Matrix to find said flight.

Have any of you recently completed (or are in the process of completing) a status challenge?  I’d love to hear any considerations that you think I may have overlooked in my analysis.