I love having elite status with airlines and hotels, because who doesn't want to be treated like a VIP every time you travel? Getting upgraded to first class, skipping long security lines, staying in a massive suite, getting free breakfast, not paying bag fees, resort fees, or seat selection fees, and a lot more.

But it can take spending tens of thousands of dollars, flying around the world multiple times, or staying as many as 100 nights a year in a hotel. But today, I am going to share some insider tricks and give you 11 different ways to get that elite status and be treated like royalty on your next trip without all the time, money, and effort.

Greg, thanks for being here. It's great to be here, Chris. We're laughing because we had to do a little bit of a retake because for some reason, nothing recorded for the first five minutes. Hey, if it's worth doing once, it's worth doing again. So we're going to talk about elite status.

And I want to just kick off with, what is it? Why is it valuable? How do you get it? Yeah. In a way, it's a marketing ploy by big companies, by airlines and hotel programs, for example, to get their best customers to keep coming back. So what they do is when you're a good customer, they award you with a low level of elite status.

And then when you're a better customer, they award you with next level elite status and so on. Most of these companies have three or four, sometimes even five levels of status. And the idea is that at each level, when you reach elite status, the idea is that next time you are a customer with that hotel or airline, you get treated better.

Maybe with an airline, for example, you might get free seat selection into like comfort plus or the economy plus type of seating, or you might get onto the upgrade list for first class for free and you have a chance of getting upgraded. With hotels, it's things like room upgrades, sometimes to suites, sometimes it's things like free breakfast and other perks.

How do you typically qualify for these statuses? Because they're not giving them away for free. No, they're not. With airlines, it used to be about how far you flew. So they would actually measure like how many miles you'd fly each year and the lowest level status would be like 25,000 miles flown and the next level might be 50,000 and top tier was usually around 100,000 miles flown, which is a heck of a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. For anyone who doesn't know, that's what, four times around the world, probably at least 40 times across the country. Yeah. Yeah. And so of course they want to, they wanted to encourage those great customers to come back by giving them lots of perks. The problem was that there was a whole game in finding the cheapest, longest distance flights.

And so people would do things called miles running, where they would earn status by booking, let's say a $300 flight to Asia that had like eight different stops along the way. So they're pinging back and forth in all these different ways and every, every segment is adding distance and so it's, it's you can build a really long flight for a cheap price.

And at some point the airlines realized that's not the type of customer they really wanted to reward. They want to reward the customers that are spending the most with them. And so almost all of them have switched to a model of rewarding based on how much you spend with the airline as opposed to how far you fly.

Now the hotels are fortunately still giving you status based on nights, so there's a little bit of gaming. If you find super cheap nights, mattress runs instead of mileage runs. Has anything else evolved with the way hotels handle things? No, you're right. I mean, they've, they've kept that. One thing that's evolved for the better for those of us that are into miles and points is that most of them now will, when you're on an awards day, you've booked a hotel free night with points or with a free night certificate.

That usually does count as an eligible night towards elite status. It used to be that, that they often didn't count. Yeah. Actually, that's been great for people like you and I, who do a lot of awards. Exactly. And what on the airline side, can you use your points to fly and also earn status?

Sometimes. So that's a fairly new phenomenon with Delta and United. When you use your miles to fly on those airlines, they treat each, every hundred miles spent as like a dollar, so like a hundred pennies. And so they treat it like that. So it counts as if you spent money and so it adds to your elite status that way.

So in some way, that's an improvement for miles and points people, if you're trying to get status that way. What we're going to talk about today is mostly ways to get status without having to put in as much work as you might spending. Let's see. I'm going to guess somewhere on the order of five to 20, 25, $30,000 is about what I imagine these airlines are looking for you to spend to get their status across all these tiers.

Yeah. That's, that's totally fair. It's in that range. Yeah. Yeah. Unless you're going for some of these kind of invite only statuses, there's concierge key on American 360 on Delta and global services on United. I know for a while, the global services threshold, everyone kind of, it wasn't published, but it was like spend more than $50,000.

So there are some of these invite only statuses with even more perks, but you really need to be spending a lot and best. I know there is no way to game your way into them. Yeah. That's why I've never, never investigated them too much because you have to actually do the spend as far as I know to get into this.

And today we're going to talk about how to not do the spend and get there. Anything that you think people might not realize isn't included when you get these different levels of elite status? Yeah. I mean, one thing that you might not realize with airline elite status is that at least the low level levels of status aren't going to get you into the airlines airport lounge.

Even at the high level, it's not usually a set benefit as much as something that you can get as like a milestone reward that you can choose, but at the expense of other things, like you might give up global upgrade certificates if you choose to get lounge access. So there's a trade off there.

Yeah. And you mentioned upgrade certificates. And I think it's important that people understand just because you have status doesn't mean you're getting upgraded. I know I have the bottom tier of status on United and since having United silver, I've never been upgraded. I am consistently somewhere around 100 on the upgrade list.

And there's usually like eight seats available. Yeah. So unless you really hit, I would say that 75 to 125,000 level, which now is really based on dollars. But the former, the top one or two tiers, I wouldn't expect you're getting a lot of upgrades on an airline if you're flying from their hub.

Now, maybe if you're flying other routes, but from San Francisco, you're probably never getting an upgraded on United at silver. Right. Yeah. And that's the key. You have to be like top tier to hope to get those upgrades. And but if you're flying from a smaller airport, you might find that bottom level silver, silver status does get you nice upgrades.

It certainly has happened to me having United silver flying out of Detroit, which is a Delta hub and only has like five or six United flights. I have gotten upgraded. But but these are for short, like nothing flights like it's not that exciting. It's like a regional jet where you're getting upgraded to like a little leg room.

And so you get, you know, so, yeah, so you're in a nicer seat for like an hour and a half and then you land and maybe the service includes a drink. And how do the airline alliances fit into status? So, yeah, this is a great thing about alliances. So there are three major airline alliances.

There's Star Alliance, which United and Air Canada are part of. There's One World, which American and Alaska are part of. And by the way, I'm just mentioning a couple. Yeah, there's like 20 to 30 plus airlines. And then there's Sky Team, which regionally you have Delta and Aeromexico. And within these alliances, when you when you earn status with your with a particular airline that's in that alliance, you also can earn alliance status.

So where that's really nice is with things like Star Alliance. If you get Star Alliance gold status, which usually goes along with like, let's say you get United gold status. That'll also give you Star Alliance gold status. And then that'll mean when you're flying outside of the United States on a Star Alliance carrier, you'll have access to the to whatever the Star Alliance lounge is when you're flying there.

And you usually, if I remember right, get a few other perks, like maybe some free checked bags on the carriers in the alliance, maybe priority boarding or security, but probably not upgrades. That's true. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it can be valuable. I've had times where I had a temporary Star Alliance gold status from a status match once.

And you know, I went into an airline, it was I think I was flying Ethiopian in Africa and there were huge lines, but I saw the Star Alliance gold security line. I'm like, Oh, I'll go over there. Just breathe, breathe through. And that was great. And then to get in the lounge, too, and I was just flying economy.

So it was great. Super helpful, especially because a lot of us are so used to TSA pre and clear and you go overseas. Not there. Yeah. So what I want to do today is I wrote a list of about 11 different ways, some of this from just watching your content, that you can shortcut this process and you can get elite status without having to put in all the effort, as well as after that, we'll talk a little bit about some ways that you might get a lot of these perks without even worrying about elite status.

So I think the first one I'll start with is just having a credit card. Can just having a credit card get you elite status on airlines and hotel groups, or do you really need to spend a lot? There's plenty of opportunities to have hotel elite status from just having a credit card.

Off the top of my head, I can't remember if there's any good airline elite statuses you have with a credit card, unless you're thinking of the American Express Centurion. Yes, that was the one that came to mind because I have one friend who has it and he's like, I get Delta Platinum status by having American Express Centurion and I'm like, that's awesome.

It also comes with an annual fee that's like $7,500 or something, and an initiation fee that's like $5,000 so I'm not sure that's a great trade off, but at least for me, it exists. And then I said, have a credit card. I believe if you have two credit cards, you could earn yourself some Delta status.

Delta has Delta Platinum card and they have a Delta Reserve card and each of them will give you a $2,500 MQD headstart just by having the card. And an MQD is Medallion Qualifying Dollars. And so the idea is just by having the card, Delta acts as if you've spent $2,500 with Delta.

And so first level Silver status with Delta, this year anyway, requires 5,000 MQDs total. So if you have two Delta cards, you'll have those two headstarts, you'll have 5,000 MQDs and boom, you've got Silver status just by holding those two cards. No flights. No flights. Yeah. And if you were to get both the personal and business version of the Platinum and the Reserve card, you could conceivably get your way to Gold status, but it would use up a lot of your Amex card slots.

That's right. That's right. Amex doesn't want you to have more than five credit cards and these are credit cards as opposed to like charge cards or pay over time cards. And so that would use up four out of your five slots. So you wouldn't be able to then also have more than one Marriott or Hilton card, for example, with Amex.

So with a few cards, like the Marriott Brilliant card, which these cards, by the way, all typically have annual fees kind of in the ballpark of hundreds of dollars, you can get Marriott Platinum and with the Hilton Aspire, you can get Hilton Diamond. And then I would say all of the entry tier hotel statuses, which don't get you a lot, are very easy to get.

There are lots of cards that will give you, you know, Marriott Gold or Silver even, which is really not worth it. I even forgot about it because I feel like I don't even know what it would get you. Yeah. You might score a bottle of water in a hotel that doesn't normally give those out.

But Hyatt is a tricky one. I don't think you can get status with just having a card or can you get the base tier? I think they do give you Discoverist, which is Hyatt's bottom tier, which is really not worth aspiring to. OK, so so cards will make it easy to get status way more on hotels and airlines.

Yeah. But that top tier of status on airlines is going to be almost impossible by just having a card, even on Delta. Right. And when it comes to Hyatt and IHG, you can't just get a card and get the status. Is that right? That's right. Yeah. Now, Marriott does have a higher tier of status than Platinum, so you can't get all the way to their top level like you can with Hilton.

But the real big benefits on Marriott come from getting to Platinum, where you start to get free breakfast and those things. I do. I do think there is one bonus that I don't know where I couldn't figure out where to fit in this narrative. But if you get to Marriott Titanium status, you do get free United Silver status, which is a great perk that I've had in the past.

But you got to go do 75 nights. And the nights you earn, unfortunately, from a lot of these cards, the status you earn from these cards does not necessarily count towards your nights towards the next level. So you might get a free Marriott Platinum with the Brilliant card, but you still need to get to 75 nights to get to the next to get to the next.

Yeah. And that's that's a common question we get all the time, like, hey, I got I got free gold status because I have the Amex Platinum card, let's say so. Does that give me, you know, so do I have to do fewer nights to get to the next level?

And no, no, it doesn't. However, the Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant card, which gives you platinum status outright. It's true that that platinum status doesn't give you a leg up towards the next level up of titanium. But the card also gives you 25 nights towards elite status each year. So just by having that card, you know, you're 25 nights into the 75 nights you would need for titanium status right there and a lot of the same thing, like the Delta.

If you just have one Delta card, you don't have status, but you get a little bit of a head start. Right. And that dovetails perfectly to the next step, which is to spend on the credit cards. So a lot of these cards might give you a little bit of your way there.

But if you spend enough, you can get all your way there. Some make this easier than others. What would you say on the airline front? Who makes it the easiest? So I would have previously said American Airlines makes it the easiest. But right now it's it's sort of a neck and neck race between AA and Delta.

They both make it pretty easy to do that through spend right now. On the flip side, you have United, where United makes it possible to spend your way to status. But you have to spend like an order of magnitude more with United to get the same level of status that you could get with AA or Delta.

So on American, you know, it's anywhere from thirty five thousand on the low end with with the right card all the way up to like two hundred thousand on Delta. It's from zero, like we mentioned, with the right cards all the way up to like two hundred thirty two hundred fifty thousand, depending on how many cards you have.

And then on United top tier status, you have to spend four hundred and eighty thousand dollars. Yeah. To get there. And on the low end, you have to spend one hundred thousand dollars. Right. Right. So that's where you've got an order of magnitude higher. Yeah. So that's that's amazing.

If you think about Delta where you could spend zero or or let's say you just have two Delta cards, then you're spending, what, five thousand to get to that first level versus what you say? One hundred thousand. One hundred thousand on United. You know, I mean, obviously, United's not as interested as American and Delta are in encouraging the credit card spend by through elite status anyway.

It seems United really wants you to fly on airplanes and they're the only one that still has a requirement of like number of segments flown. You have a minimum number of segments you have to fly with United to to keep status where the others you could totally get status without ever flying.

Yeah. And then two other airlines worth calling out. So JetBlue will let you spend your way towards status. I think at an order I didn't do the math, but you need 50 to 250 tiles and each tile costs a thousand dollars of spend. So 50 to two hundred fifty thousand dollars.

So kind of on the same same order of magnitude, but with a lot less flexibility because they just don't have as many partners as all the other airlines and they don't fly as many places. And then the other is Southwest. While you can't spend your way, I guess you can spend your way, I think, to a list, but it's it's hard.

You can very easily spend your way, especially with the help of signup bonuses to companion pass, which funny enough, is on a different track than a list. It's like you you can every dollar you earn on your credit card or your Southwest points from just flying. They all count towards companion pass.

If you get three hundred and thirty five thousand Southwest points, you get companion pass and you can nominate one person and that person can fly for free other than taxes all the year you earn it and the next year. And I think that is actually a distinction we didn't bring up.

Usually when you earn a status, you get it for that year and the following year. So if you time it well and you're able to earn it in January on Southwest, for example, you would get to have a companion for the whole year and the whole next year. And because welcome bonuses count towards that right now, for example, the Southwest cards are doing an eighty five thousand point welcome bonus that gets you more than halfway towards companion pass.

Yeah. Yeah. You're really close. And having a card also takes ten thousand points off the requirement for companion pass. So, yeah, it really makes it easy. And so I know a lot of couples who will every two years alternate who signs up for two companion or two Southwest cards right at the end of the year so that they'll complete the spend for the sign up bonus in January.

Then you know, they'll have the companion pass then for the rest of that calendar year and all of the next and then their spouse does it two years later and they keep altering. It is a very common points thing. You guys have a whole article on it that I'll link to in the show notes about how to achieve companion pass.

But man, if you are anywhere near a bunch of Southwest flights, it is an awesome status to have. Doesn't really get you any priority boarding, doesn't really get you any feature other than a free companion, but no one else is doing that. It's super valuable for sure. And then on the hotel front, we talked about how, you know, Marriott makes it easy to get to Platinum Diamond on Hilton is as easy as getting the Aspire card.

So I don't want to spend too much time. Yes, you could probably spend money on cards and earn status, right? But I think the coveted status is Hyatt Globalist, which, you know, best I know, I've never actually had it. It is the best status to have in the hotel world, but you can't just get it for free.

Can you spend your way to get it? Yeah, you can. Well, let's first say why it's so coveted. I think Hyatt does a better job than the other chains of making sure that their individual hotels actually fulfill the promise of elite status. You can then go to any Hyatt and you can be pretty confident you really are going to get free breakfast, which contrasts greatly with Marriott, where at Platinum status, you're supposed to get free breakfast.

But there are so many clauses to that statement that we made a chart showing, you know, are you going to get free breakfast? And what does it mean at all these different brands with Marriott? But even if you know whether or not you're supposed to get free breakfast with a particular brand with Marriott, Marriott doesn't do a great job of making sure that the individual hotels adhere to that.

So often they'll just kind of opt out or give you a certificate for $10 at the coffee shop or that. And they're like, "Yeah, we have a beautiful buffet. You get $10 so you can get a coffee and a bagel." Probably not a bagel, maybe a croissant. There are Hyatt hotels that'll play games like that, but I just feel like overall Hyatt does a better job of managing that.

More than that, some of the benefits they guarantee are just so valuable. Things like free parking on award stays, which can be incredibly valuable, especially in big cities. I mean, imagine easily saving $70 to $100 a night in New York City or LA. Or San Francisco. Or San Francisco.

Or San Francisco. My dad had a really early doctor's appointment at UCSF and he's like, "We just want to stay in the city. We don't have to drive in." And they stayed at a Marriott. He has titanium status. And that parking was still somewhere around $90. Yeah, because Marriott doesn't have that benefit, but Hyatt does.

Another one that Hyatt has is on paid stays, no resort fees. So Hyatt does not charge resort fees at all if you book a stay with points. Hilton also doesn't do that with points. Marriott does though. But Hyatt also, on a paid stay, if you have top tier status, you're not going to pay the resort fee, which at some hotels can be absolutely massive.

Yeah. Especially if you're staying for a week and all that stuff. Yeah. Well, I mean, there are high-end resorts that cost $1,000, $2,000 a night where their resort fee is a percentage. It's like 20%. Oh, I've never seen one of those. So you're talking really big money and it's all waived.

That's awesome. Yeah. I think that in one of two ways, you get some headstart with some of the cards, right? If you sign up for the Hyatt business or personal card. The personal card will give you five late nights each year. So you're five out of 60 there to top tier.

But if you spend, you can get yourself there, I think it's about $100,000. Does that sound right? If you have both cards and you spend them optimally, because one of them gives you a headstart. The other one gives you a little bit of a faster way there while spending.

That's right. So the personal card will give you two elite nights for every $5,000 you spend. So there you're talking about closer to $120,000 spend, but then you've got to subtract out the five you got automatically. So whatever that is with the business card, which doesn't give you free nights automatically at all.

You can also get with $50,000 spend, you'll get a rebate on points, on points bookings for the rest of that year, up to a cap. So not only are you earning more elite nights with that spend than you would with the equivalent spend on the personal card, but you're also getting that other perk.

So the ideal combination, if you just want to spend your way to Hyatt Globalist is to spend $15,000 on the personal card, because that $15,000 spend will also get you a second free night. Which you can use to kind of get one of your nights towards 60. And then the business card $50,000 spend is ideal.

Yeah, I think I did the math. And if you wanted to optimally do it, you'd have to put about $108,000 on those two cards. Now I want to be clear, this is not a strategy where you just go out and spend $108,000. A friend of mine actually did this, he had a big tax bill, and he split it out over the course of the year on a Hyatt card, or actually, I think he only did it on one.

So maybe he ended up spending $110,000. But that $110,000 cost him, let's call it round up a little bit to 2% of fees. So he spent about $2,000. He got Hyatt Globalist, but he also got 100,000 Hyatt points, which depending on how you want to value them could be anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 also.

And so he kind of basically pre-bought 100,000 Hyatt points and got free Globalist by paying a lot of tax bills on his credit card. If you were just out for the points, you'd be better off doing a Chase Ultimate Rewards card that earns 1.5 points per dollar everywhere. The Freedom Unlimited or the Ink Business Unlimited, because those can be transferred to Hyatt one-to-one, so you'd earn a lot more Hyatt points that way, 50% more.

But it wouldn't give you the status, and so if the status is important to you, then that's great. The other thing to mention is Hyatt also has these milestone rewards. So when you get 20 nights, 30 nights, 40 nights, 50 nights, 60 nights, 70 nights, etc., each time you sometimes get an automatic reward and sometimes you get to pick in addition to the automatic one, you get to pick something.

So those have value too. So your friend not only got all those Hyatt points, but he also got upgrade certificates. He got some extra free nights. He got Guest of Honor awards, which can be used to, if you don't have Globalist yet and you get a Guest of Honor award, it can be used to upgrade your own stay to a Globalist stay and you get the free parking, free breakfast, and all that kind of stuff.

Or if you have a friend who you want to give Globalist status to for a stay, you could give them that Guest of Honor award. An interesting point you made in a recent episode was around Hyatt status and I'd always thought, "Okay, I'm going to go for Globalist because I've got some spending to do for taxes this year." And then I realized, "Well, I'm probably only staying once or twice a year at a Hyatt." And so to go all the way to Globalist might not actually be worth it because at 40 nights, you get this Guest of Honor coupon that you can use for yourself to give yourself Globalist for a stay.

Right, right. And you can also get a few Club Access awards, so you can use those. So I'll just caution people that are excited about Globalist, you might not even need it if you're not traveling that much. Right. At 40 nights, you get both the Guest of Honor and you can pick a suite upgrade award.

And so now, unfortunately, you can't use them on the same stay, but if you have two Hyatt stays coming up, one where you'd really benefit with booking at the lowest rate and then upgrading to a suite, that would be the perfect use of that suite upgrade certificate. And another one where you'd really benefit from all the perks of Globalist, apply your Guest of Honor certificate to that other one.

So you could have two fantastic stays with what you get at 40 nights. And by the way, if you get to 40 nights and then you have two fantastic stays, those stays count towards the nights, so you're probably pretty close now to 60. You don't actually need to get all the way to Globalist before you stay.

You can get to that 40K level and then maybe those nights will get you the rest of the way there. So maybe it's actually not 108 because if you're going to do all this, you better be staying at Hyatt. Exactly. I was going to say that earlier that for most people, it doesn't make sense to spend your way entirely to it because you want to use your actual stays to help you get there and then you won't have as much spend required.

If you don't have actual stays at Hyatt, there's no point in doing this at all if you don't have actual stays. Yeah. Okay. So that's spending on cards. And so that seems to be a way with almost every program you can get your way to status. It's just going to cost you a lot with some like United and a lot less with others.

Yeah. Can you spend money outside of a card to get status with any of these programs or is it always have to be on one of their cards? So American has a really interesting loyalty program. They totally gamified their elite program and what they did is they said almost every time, not every time, but almost every time that you earn an American Airlines mile, you'll also earn something called a loyalty point and it's the loyalty points with American that decide what level of elite status you've attained.

And so if you think about it with all of these airline and hotel programs, there's multiple ways to earn their points. It's not just spend on the credit card. It's not just spend with them. There's also things like there are online shopping portals where you could shop through like the Advantage eShopping portal and click through from the portal to shop at like Macy's.com or something.

And the American Airlines portal might say you'll get five miles per dollar for shopping at Macy's. Then let's say you buy something that's a thousand dollars. Then you'd get 5,000 American Airlines miles and 5,000 loyalty points. So you can do that. They also partner with like a, they have a hotel booking engine.

They have car rentals. There's a lot of different things like that where just your normal everyday, I'm about to like, I'm about to spend money online. There might be a way of doing it so that you'll get a lot of American Airlines miles and loyalty points towards elite status.

And now keep in mind for anyone listening, a lot of these other airlines have these same shopping portals. They just don't give you anything towards elite status. We've talked about how to use cards and spending to get to status and obviously the standard ways. You mentioned status match earlier, just very briefly.

How do status matches work? When do they make sense? Yeah. So status matches, usually the way it works is you are basically saying to an airline, you know, Hey, I have been spending all my money with United, but now I want to, I want to try out Delta, but I don't want to start from ground zero.

I'm used to my elite perks with United. So Delta then will say, okay, we'll give you a matching status level for usually it's 90 days. And then there'll be a challenge component to it. If you fly a certain amount, and in this case, if you spend a certain amount with Delta in that, in those 90 days, while you have this trial status, then you get to keep it, uh, for longer.

And, and, uh, Delta's status match is actually very generous right now. It's letting you keep it for the rest of the current calendar year, all of the next and into January of the year after that. So that is actually similar to how I got my status. So there's status matches, there's status matches that have a challenge component.

And then sometimes they're just status challenges where I was able to do a challenge to get my United silver status where I didn't have any status at all. And it often feels like whatever the requirement for a year is, if you can hit one quarter of that requirement in 90 days, they'll let you keep the status.

Now the next year you have to do the full requirement, but, um, do you see those pop up a lot? Or was I pretty lucky in finding one? That's very common. And, um, often if you work for a large corporation, there's often deals with, uh, different brands that where they'll, they'll have open status matches, like what you described for any employee.

Um, Hyatt will do that with a lot of, uh, businesses. They'll give you a, a challenge where, um, you have to stay 20 nights within three months, let's say to get a globalist status. Now within those status matches, I'll point out that I am pretty sure that none of the tricks we just talked about work.

So it's not within 90 days, earn 20 nights from your credit card spend or from, you know, other loyalty points. You usually in those challenges have to actually do the main way of earning points. Almost always. And, and I mentioned though, uh, Delta's generous status match before Delta's will let spend on their credit cards count towards meeting that match.

Okay. So United will absolutely not absolutely not. Yeah. And Hyatt as well. Okay. And there's two websites. Status matcher is a website that just has a database of all of these different matches. Like people report, I got success going from a to B. So you might have success there.

Yeah. It's really useful. Cause you know, you might be like, Oh, this is the first time I'm going to stay at a, I don't know, Wyndham property or something. I've got my Hilton status. Can I match over? And you can check status match or.com to see does, would that work before you waste your time trying to do it?

Yep. And I'll, I'll point out that usually there's some window where you can't repeat these. So if you do a status match because you're about to stay at a Wyndham and you can't keep up that status and you're not going to probably be able to do it again next year.

That's true. There's two reasons you might want to do a status match. One might be because you really think you're going to meet the challenge and keep the status longer because you really are going to start you know, flying that airline or staying in that hotel brand more. The other reason is that you have a big trip coming up and you want to have elite status for that trip.

And so you do that challenge and, and then you have that trade off of saying, well, okay, I'm going to do this challenge now, but depending on the rules of the particular program, it might be five years before I can do another one. Yep. And you often can't match a free status to a challenge.

Is that right? Like if I got United Silver from having Marriott Titanium, I couldn't match my United Silver to a Delta status if I got it for free from Marriott. Technically you're not supposed to, but it, it often works. Okay. They'll often ask you for the history, your history.

So not just, not just a picture of like your screen showing that you have a certain level of status, but also in the case of airlines, like your, your flying history with that airline that you're matching from. And I've done that. I've matched from Delta to others where all of my Delta history or almost all of it was all like award flights, um, or earning, um, earning elite status from credit card spend.

And that's all in my like transaction history. And they still like, they just see a pile of stuff and they don't know what it is. Okay. And so it's, so it's, it's worth trying for sure. Awesome. Yeah. I mean, I guess a big theme that I hear you guys always talk about on your show is, but it doesn't hurt to try like the worst thing.

They just say no. It's amazing how many times it just works, even if you just try. Yeah. Yeah. And separate from status matches and challenges, sometimes they're just offers. So there was an offer a few weeks ago that was on Southwest, which I feel like they've done one or two of these a year, the past few years, which is fly around trip flight and get companion pass for three months, fly to Hawaii, get companion pass for right.

Two months, that kind of stuff. I don't know why Southwest keeps doing this, but there, there have been a handful of times where just taking one round trip flight would net you at least a couple months of companion pass. They do it because they think they're going to encourage more, you know, flying more revenue than they would without it.

So, you know, once you get that companion pass, you're very much incentivized to, to fly Southwest instead of the competition. That's fair. And then every now and then there's, and maybe this is kind of a similar thing to what we described with a challenge, but I know if you get to built platinum, you get Air France KLM flying blue status, um, I think for a year and I don't think it's a challenge and that you don't have to do anything.

So it's kind of a promotion, but it's not forever. Right. And it's not automatic. It's like you have to, I think you have to transfer some, uh, points to Air France KLM to trigger that you'll get that status for a year. Exactly. Yeah. We have an Air France flight coming up this summer and I'm like, is it worth doing this?

I mean, we might have to change our flights and whatever status it matches to does not waive change fees on Air France, which is what I was really hoping for. Right. Right. Um, and, and by the way, I, I don't know if we mentioned this before, but in general, if you're, if you're flying, um, you know, regional first class or international business class on any of these airlines, most of these elite benefits aren't going to help you at all because you're already getting all the, all the perks you're getting.

You're already upfront, you're, you're already in boarding group, at least close to boarding group one. The really, the only thing at that point that helps sometimes you could get, um, change fees waived. You could get, uh, and sometimes you get special treatment. You just wrote a post about getting bumped from business class on an airline that I don't think you had status on.

Is that right? That's right. That's right. Had you had status on that airline? I'm sure I would not have gotten bumped. That's right. I was flying Lufthansa using miles from, from, uh, Avianca life miles had booked a, a Lufthansa business class ticket. I got bumped to premium economy. Um, some speculate that, you know, that like, why was I picked?

Some speculate, and I don't know if this is true, that maybe from Lufthansa's point of view, I might've been on the cheapest business class ticket on the plane, right? But had you had Lufthansa status linked to that flight? I'm guessing. Sure. They would have left you, let you stay in that business class seat.

Bump somebody else. So Marriott actually has a, uh, guarantee. So if you have elite status, um, and you get walked, they, they promise you all kinds of points and things. Um, but there's also like, what will the hotel that walks you do for you? Uh, so one time we were walked in Germany in Baden-Baden from the Marriott there.

And the email we got said that they were going to put us up at, at this all suites hotel. And I look it up, it's bad reviews. It's, it's a cheap hotel. Like it's, it's like half the price of the, the one we had booked. Um, so I researched what's the best hotel in Baden-Baden and I found one that looked amazing.

And so I wrote back and said, you know, Hey, we were really looking forward to staying at the room, Rumors Baden-Baden, uh, cause of what a great, you know, a reputation you have. And we'd expect you to put us up at an equally good hotel. And I named the other one and they did it.

Wow. And in fact, uh, we were in a fairly large group. One of the rooms that we had confirmed was a suite for, um, four people in one room. And uh, they put them up in a suite at this other hotel. It was probably much more expensive, much more expensive.

Yeah. Okay. So a few last ways to get status. So one, you can get it gifted to you. Uh, there are a lot of statuses that let you give other people status and I know you've had high tier Delta status. So every year you could choose to give someone status.

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, uh, high tier Delta will let you gift two people now. Like, so Delta gives you a one choice benefit when you become platinum and three when you become diamond. So at platinum you can, um, you can, you can use your choice benefit to gift two people Delta silver status.

Um, and at, uh, diamond, you could use one of your three choice benefits to gift, uh, two people gold status. So that's pretty good. Yeah. One of the other cool ones, which isn't really gifting, but when you hit a million miles on United, which I'll get to million miler and lifetime status next, you actually can nominate a person that just gets your status.

Yeah. That's amazing. So for, for three years, my dad had million miler and United and global services. And I constantly begged him to make me his companion instead of my mom, which he didn't do, which is probably the best choice for him. But I was like, come on, make me your companion.

And so now, uh, funny enough, he still has million miler status. He has a lifetime status, so he's got one K for life. So my mom also has one K for life. That's awesome. Which is really, really amazing, which I guess is a good, a good dovetail. So there's a lot of different airlines that will gift you status, Delta, Alaska, American, Hilton, Hyatt at different tiers.

But that lifetime status is another one where once you've played the game enough, you can stop playing the game. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and, and my wife and I are so close to that with, with Delta. I mean, well, we both have, um, Delta diamond status, which is the top tier before you get to those like secret tiers.

Um, and, but we're both probably within about five years of getting, um, 2 million miler status, which will give us a platinum status for life, which in my mind, that's good enough. I would miss some things about diamond, but once, once you have platinum automatically, the extra work involved in getting beyond that is so much is so much because the bonuses from credit cards, you don't get to just earn the Delta.

You have to start all the way from the bottom. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So we'll just stop there. And with the major airlines, uh, it's about a million points. Lifetime points gets you to the kind of like second tier status, like gold level. Um, and then depending on the airline Delta, you can get to three 60 with 5 million.

You can get to global services with 4 million on United, but wow, that is a lot of miles. I don't even know how to comprehend flying 5 million miles. There are people that do it. I'm never going to get there. I think I, I'm closest on Marriott, which is 10 years at platinum and 600 nights.

We'll get you platinum for life. Yeah. And I feel like that is in striking distance. Everything else is off the table. I actually have that with Marriott. And, um, the, the reason I have it though, um, is, you know, I've had, I've had status mostly from credit cards for many years now and the credit cards, the Marriott credit cards give you, um, nights each year.

So most of the Marriott credit cards give you 15 nights. And while having multiple consumer Marriott cards doesn't stack, like you won't get more than 15 nights by having two consumer Marriott cards. If you have a consumer and a business card, those two stack to 30 nights. And now if, if the consumer card you have is the brilliant card, then you have 10 more nights.

So you have 40 nights each year automatically. So, so let's say you, you stay, you know, 10 nights a year at Marriott anyway. Um, so that's 50 nights every year. That's counting towards that, uh, like 600. Yeah. That's counting towards the 600. So 10 years of playing the Marriott game and you're going to be pretty close to platinum for life.

Yeah. Um, yeah, that's the way I see it is I need like three more years of platinum. And so it might be worth it even to just pay, to have the brilliant card, to just make sure I get there because it's a three year cost of a, you know, five or $600 annual fee minus all the credits and coupons and all that.

But then you don't have to play again and then you have it for life. So the game of kind of hitting lifetime is super interesting on the flights. I don't think I'll ever get there. Um, a couple of quick ones. One is there are a couple of cases where you can buy status.

So I think frontier allowed you to buy status, uh, and it was very open. It wasn't a secret. It's like, you could just buy it. Yep. You don't have to fly on frontier a lot, but if you do, you could do it. If you do, it's actually a great deal, uh, you know, cause there's things like a wave pet fees, which if you travel with your pet, it would add up like crazy.

And you get like free changes, all kinds of things that, um, that can make it very much worth it. Yeah. Yeah. Americans sold status in the past, but not right now. There's a site that I think is pretty sketchy called airline status.com that will claims to sell you status for hundreds of dollars a quarter or a year.

I will absolutely not endorse it, but they claim to do it. If anyone has experience there, I would love to hear how that went. Um, and then also this isn't really buying it, but there are corporate partnerships. So if you work at a large company and they have a program with Delta to save money on long haul flights, chances are there are a few people at that company that are getting comp status.

That's right. And so my wife, when she worked at Lyft, she did the partnership with Delta. And there were a few people on the executive team at Lyft that got comp status. And so I don't know if you can make friends with whoever's doing that deal. Maybe you can get on that short list or just be an entrepreneur and become a huge company and partner with Delta or United, whoever you want to fly.

Yeah. And then on the corporate side, if you do run a company, maybe it's not big enough to do a partnership like that, but it is probably big enough to join one of the corporate programs. So United has perks plus and United for business. There's one with each, I think Sky bonus is Delta and I can't remember Americans, but they totally revamped it.

But there are ways to earn extra points for regular flights for everyone on your team. So in United, you put all of your employees in, you earn a much smaller number of points, but those points can be used to generate free flight certificates or status. So it ends up costing somewhere on the order of like 80,000 United miles to get United silver and 160,000 United miles to get United gold in their corporate program.

And then last there's this pass plus program, which basically United lets you pre-buy at the beginning of the year, dollars to use on United at a discount and not a discount like a percent off, but depending on the fare, you get a baked in corporate rate. And if you spend enough, they will comp you status.

Yeah. So it starts at $25,000, we'll start comping you gold all the way up to this year, global services. If you pre-buy $75,000, you'll get global services for a year. Yeah. The downside is the funds, as long as you keep renewing the program, which I want to say is at least $10,000 a year, you won't lose the dollars.

But to get the status, you have to commit to $75,000 of spend every single year. So if you already spend $75,000 a year on United, you'll probably get global services anyways. I was going to say. But here's a way to get it up front. And then there are a couple other things that I'll fall in the bucket of corporate partnerships.

If you get a founder's card membership, you're going to get some free hotel status, IHG and Hilton Gold and Caesars Diamond. It depends on the type of founder's card membership you get. I know, there's tiers now. There's tiers. And if you get the kind from having JetBlue status, then the tier of founder's card you get is the tier that is basically you get on their spam mail.

You get constantly, constantly spammed to pay up to the higher tier. And that's really the only benefit that I could find out of it, as if that was a benefit. And then on the vacation home side, I did a whole episode on vacation homes. We're not going to go down that, but I noticed that there's a vacation home thing where you buy into a membership, like a luxury vacation property called Exclusive Resorts.

And I think every Exclusive Resorts membership also comes with a Delta Platinum status, but you usually have to commit to spending somewhere on the order of $40,000 or $50,000 a year on vacation homes. But if you do that, there's a potential option. Timeshare ownership. Is that similar to what you're talking about?

Because those also have elite benefits in some cases. Yes. Often with the hotel. This is the only one that I know. This one went to the airline, which is kind of cool. Yeah. Yeah, that's different. Getting free. You're not the kind of person spending $50,000 on vacation homes. You're probably also the kind of person that could get a Centurion card and get Delta Platinum free also.

True. I think that's all the shortcuts that I found. And I went through most of what you've written. The one question that'll wrap us up is, is this actually worth it? We talked about all the ways to get it, but when does it actually make sense to get elite status?

And are there actually ways you can get some of these perks without having to chase the status? Yeah. So, first of all, is it worth it? Loaded question. Well, so at a high level, you could sort of argue no, because if you need to do tricks to get the elite status, then it means you're not flying that airline a lot or staying in those hotels enough to get the status without doing tricks to get there.

And if you're not staying that much or flying that much, how much value could you be getting from these things? On the other hand, if you do the tricks to get status and it doesn't cost you that much, so take for example, getting Marriott Platinum status, which you could get just by having the Bonvoy Brilliant card, the $650 annual fee is offset by great perks anyway.

So you could think of it as being worth paying anyway, but you get Platinum status and you might just have, maybe you've got two big Marriott stays that year, but maybe they're stays that are important to you. Like maybe you're staying at the, you know, St. Regis Bora Bora and breakfast there would cost you something like $50 per person per day, but you're going to get it free because you have that status.

And so the benefits can really add up even just with a couple of stays a year. I mean, it's funny because when you say that, I think, well, I did stay at the St. Regis and Bora Bora and I did get free breakfast and that was awesome. However, I find myself now that I have some status, when I look where we're going, it's almost like I put these blinders on that say, well, let's just look at places where I can get these perks.

And I often wonder, and I'm starting to push myself to not think this way. If I didn't worry about trying to stay at the place that I had the status, could I just book a rate that included the free breakfast? And could that even be cheaper or a better experience?

And I've broken out of the shell on airlines there because UnitedSilver just isn't really worth anything. And so now I just booked the direct flight. That's the easiest. And if you start playing the points and miles game enough, like you said, you're flying in business or even premium economy, the status kind of doesn't matter.

And so I do question whether sometimes having status forces you to spend more to stay in a thing. That's why they do it. I mean, that's exactly it. People do. And yeah, so I think you're exactly right. I think that analysis is right that in most cases, you're probably better off, you know, buying your own elite status by, as you said, you know, booking a stay that already includes the free breakfast, if that's what's important to you.

Maybe even negotiating rates with a hotel that regardless of whether you have status or not. So the flip side is, you know, a lot of if you're really into this game, points and miles and everything to me, like I just love the game. And so it's a game where, you know, you win not just by earning lots of points and having the most points.

You win by taking advantage of it and, you know, booking the best stays, booking the best flights and travel, you know, traveling the world and enjoying it. So the winning is amazing. And to me, the elite status thing is almost like part of that game. It's like badges you earn along the way.

And then when you enjoy it, when you get like an amazing suite at a hotel, when you get regularly bumped up into first class when you're flying, you know, regionally, those things, it's hard to, you know, sort of put a dollar value on that. And so if you have the means where you can do these games to get elite status, you know, it's not hurting you financially to do it.

You might find it's worth doing just because it's fun. Yeah. That's kind of where I am. I've enjoyed the game over the years. I think when you have kids that are really young, you're like, well, is this game worth it? This this couple of years. I feel like I'm kind of getting ready to go back into it.

One thing we didn't really talk too much about, we just touched on a couple of things is when it comes to getting these perks without the status, I'm actually going to point people to two episodes you did on rolling your own hotel status and rolling your own airline status.

Great. A couple highlights. You want free check bags? Yes, you can get status or you can just open up a credit card with almost any of the airlines and you get free check bags. You want upgrades at hotels. You want early check in and late checkout. There are a lot of upgrade programs.

We built one for ourselves at allthehacks.com/upgrade where you can book a rate that gives you through Hyatt Preve, Marriott Stars and Luminous, Four Seasons Preferred Partners, a lot of the perks you would get with status anyways. And sometimes I caught a clip in one episode you did with maybe even a higher upgrade priority.

So those are the perks you get there. And then I know you've talked a lot about you can just use your points and book suites. You can use your points and book business class and just kind of do it that way. So I'll point people to those two episodes in the interest of time.

But there are also a lot of ways that you could just generate a lot of these benefits without necessarily having to go and earn the status. One of the funny things when we were talking about Hyatt a lot, Hyatt is the hardest of the hotel chains to get top tier status, but they have the best top tier status.

But they also have the most ways that you can get the benefits of similar to status without getting status. So they're the best at allowing you to book, you know, suites with points. They have the thing like we talked about before of guest of honor. So if you have a friend who has status, you can get maybe they'll give you a guest of honor certificate.

Or pay cash and upgrade with points to a suite. Exactly. There's so many ways with Hyatt to do that. So it is ironic that it's the best top tier status, but also has the best ways of avoiding needing that status. OK, so last two quick things. One, we didn't talk about car rental status at all.

I'll highlight that the reason why is that you can get car rental status pretty easily. If you have a Chase Reserve or Amex Platinum, you're getting top tier or right below top tier status on most programs. So we kind of skipped that over. Could you in one minute explain whether car rental status even matters or why?

Yeah, I like I like national executive status because so, you know, national has that emerald aisle where you just pick your own car. But with executive status, you go to the executive aisle and you could pick from bigger cars. And what I've done with that is not just get nicer cars in the executive aisle, but also there have been times where we're traveling with enough people where we would need two cars or we would need something like a minivan or one of those six seater SUVs.

And often we so we'll book two. We'll see if we find one of those big minivan or whatever in the executive aisle, because that's where it would normally be. And if we if it is, then we cancel the other booking. And for anyone who made it this far, that's a hack I've never heard.

And I love it. Last thing before we wrap, we've talked a lot about the show. You've been on it before. Everybody should go check out the Frequent Miler site. All the episodes you do on Frequent Miler in the air. But could you tell people really briefly why we even managed to meet up and what you're in the middle of doing?

Sure. Yeah. So our team does a challenge, some kind of travel challenge where we try to show off like what's the most you could do with points and miles. So the first ever challenge was called 40K to Far Away, where we each had 40000 points and 400 dollars to try to go as far away as we could.

And each year we make up a different challenge. This year it's called Flying by the Seat of our Points. And the idea is that every two days ish, we're given a destination that we need to get to. Like we don't know ahead of time until until we're doing a live stream on YouTube and we're being told, OK, next stop is here.

And so we're just starting the challenge. The first stop for all of us to get to is Los Angeles. And so today I need to get there by about three. And our check in at the hotel, we have to be there before six p.m. for our live stream check in and over live stream, we'll learn where we're going next, which will be international destinations.

And so we're all going to meet up in L.A., but the three of us competing, then we'll go off to different international destinations and then the final stage will come back together somewhere internationally. We don't know where we're going to show off like how you could use points and miles to book last minute travel.

This is awesome. By the time this comes out, this will probably have ended. I wish you the best of luck on your travels. Thank you so much for being here. It was great being here.