Questions and Answers

Last year I lost my Gold status, even though I flew 7 flights on American during the year. I complained and they offered it back for $500. I’m still mad at them. For the rest of the year, I avoided AA, flying Jetblue, Southwest, and Delta instead. I have 67,000 miles on AA, and not much on the others. My question is: I’m going to Peru next December and the last time I flew to Argentina, I got bumped up to Gold. Now, I’m not sure with the program changes if it will happen and if I should just suck it up and go back to American for the rest of the year (I have a bunch of trips coming up) and then fly AA to Peru and try to get my Gold status back. I don’t fly very expensive flights (average fare $350). On a side note, I’ve really enjoyed these other airlines. AA has the worst customer service of them all and I haven’t missed them a bit!!!

Thoughts?

Not sure why you complained about losing Gold status if you only flew 7 flights…..

When you had AA Gold, did the benefits really help? As in, were you actually upgraded on short flights and checked bags often? If not, I wouldnt worry too much about requalifying for Gold again, especially since there is an EQD requirement now.

Free checked bags can be had with one of AA’s credit cards, upgrades for flights under 500 miles are nice in theory, but there is probably a lot of competition and the flights are fairly short.

Lucky wrote about being a free agent this year, or at least not trying so hard to requalify for status with AA.

If you really found AA Gold to be that valuable, by all means, go for it. Otherwise, it might just be better to forego status.

Yes, I had lots of upgrades, etc. It sounds like from your response that attaining Gold status with the changes might be impossible anyway.

I wouldnt say impossible – you just have to work for it and it now includes a spending requirement