Is It Illegal To Buy Airline Or Hotel Status?

Yuck

@Lucky In your opinion, what are the chances that you can get away with status matching and what are the repercussions if they do find out you bought your status?

It is illegal because by buying/selling status you are breaking the terms and conditions, a legally binding contract. It's not criminal, but you are breaking the private law that is established between yourself and the program when you sign up. Of course the program will likely do nothing more than terminate your membership, but they could also permanently ban you from visiting them, or whatever else the contract allows for.

it's a status. Like receiving a medal for something. I'm proud to be on the highest level on an airline and on a hotel membership. I envy of another who had high status at another airline or hotel. Traveling this much is hard and I enjoy the "respect" I get from the businesses. (I wish I could change the "respect" font size to point five)
Would I pay $100 for a diamond status? Of course if it was allowed. I would also pay $100 for an Olympic gold if I could.

The benefits of status are worth more than the respect in my view. I've been stuck in AA PLT for years and have never reached EXP but next year with the new revenue based reward system I will finally reach the promise land and earn the four SWUs I'd love to use. And I agree about diamond status!

Thank you for this insight.

Remember when US Airways used to outright sell Chairman's Preferred top tier status to anyone? Start from zero, it was once $10,000 I think. During the Great Recession, all you needed was 1 EQM, and you could buy the training remaining 99,999 for $3500. Or something very similar.

Wow, unbelievable that people are profiting off of this, most likely doing it illegally by fake status matches. A search for just the diamond status revealed 10 auctions, I reported every one of them. There were at least 20-30 of them sold already.

There's a third scenario that you missed. I worked for a company that had a loose partnership with Marriott. As a result some of our properties earned points. In addition, we were able to buy status from Marriott for customers (and it was very reasonably priced). We could only do this a limited number of times a year but it was not that restrictive. I'm sure other companies have this type of agreement with Marriott; I know we didn't explicitly ask for it and it seemed part of the overall points agreement. I'm sure some of the statuses for sale are from other companies that have this type of agreement.

@Theresa
I highly doubt that that's the case here; considering that it is only ~$100

I can't believe someone would go through the trouble of reporting all of those on eBay. It must be fun to be a pawn for corporate America...

I have sold SAS EuroBonus Gold status three times. As a Diamond member with SAS I can give away one card every 12 months. I have sold them for 5000 NOK each (= ~615 USD each), so in total around 1900 USD profit for me.

I do not understand why someone would want to pay that much for it. Only when you travel enough to qualify, should status be worth that much to you. Not that I complain, of course.

What's really funny is everyone bitching about how it's "illegal" and are reporting these guys on ebay are most probably for open borders and think it's "racist" to make people immigrate to the US legally (given the usual SJW tone of the comments).

@Keith: I've been with a number of large consumer brands and we've always had someone whose job included keeping an eye on eBay for illicit merch, be it trademark infringements, counterfeits, or other stuff.

It's not hard to do, actually. You set up some saved searches and there's only work to be done when you get an alert.

@Keith: how about protecting innocent people who pay money for these scams? What if one was your own mother? Apparently you only care about yourself. It took all of two minutes to click "report" link on each auction.

@JeffISU

Yeah you're a regular superhero saving people from circumventing 1000s of dollars to get status at a lousy hotel chain.

Next you'll be swooping in to save everyone from points hacking too.

We got some real vigilantes on our hands here.

How about all these bloggers allegedly using miles and traveling on multiple airlines with all these miles?
I do not believe any of it?
Either the airlines give them the free tickets and they all lie about it on their blogs. Or they buy the miles from their clients for cheap and then use it for travel. It is impossible for a blogger to travel and pay for tickets and find all this mileage space on all these airlines and keep traveling.
I do not believe any of it.
I do not see anything wrong with people paying for status match or buying someone's miles, because all role models here, the bloggers all do it.
And we have real vigilantes here on here. Wow! Have nothing better to do?
First, audit all these bloggers because they all lie about their miles and how they get to travel First Class on so many airlines. How would you earn all those millions of miles?
I have traveled myself extensively and I have done the math and it is simply impossible unless they were millionaires and had shit loads of free time on their hands and had 25 lifetimes to live their lives to earn all those miles just to travel Lufthansa First Class 4 time in one year and then multiple other airlines! Or fly Etihad in First Class several times. Impossible! Ask your bloggers to be upfront and honest about how they travel and use miles.