Wait, what? I'm Platinum for next year? AND i got PlusPoints?!

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I just got back from our annual holiday trip to Australia and I'm sitting here at 7am jet lagged and slowly combing through 2 months of low-priority emails and notice there's a United Airlines survey to earn 500 miles. 

Fine, I'll do it. "Did our recent email informing you that we've decided to extend your Platinum status through 2027 have any impact on yo---" WAIT, WHAT?! 

Dig through my inbox and sure enough, on the 16th of January: 


…and it's not just the status, I have 40 shiny new PlusPoints sitting in my account! (My flight home from Australia was in Polaris thanks to last year's PlusPoints). Keep in mind, I barely crossed the finish line for Gold this year (12,200 PQPs), and barely crossed the line for Platinum the year before. Prior to that, I've only ever been Gold or Silver. No idea what set of marketing / AI parameters selected me for this, but I'll take it. 

I love that this happens the same week that United is sending out ghastly expensive buy-up offers to pay cash to move up one higher tier than you've actually earned. Reading through Reddit's United forum, it seems like my buy-up would have been north of $5000! So much for my prediction that I wouldn't bother getting status in 2025/26! 

Platinum members have higher upgrade priority, but that's a fairly nebulous thing to try and pin a price to. With Seats.Aero I basically never book an Economy flight hoping my upgrade request will clear, I only book pre-confirmable seats. But given that I will pay for the cheapest Business Class ticket home versus risking sitting in Economy (it's happened multiple times!), these PlusPoints alone are realistically worth $3000-ish to me.

Given that I spent $12k on flying and Platinum is 9x vs. Gold's 8x, this also presumably means 12,000 more redeemable miles and 300 more bonus starter PQPs. 

I guess I can also mention here that we had a couple of nice Gold perks down under that I wasn't expecting: Air New Zealand let Star Alliance Golds pre-board our flight (I felt like a 1k!), and Virgin Australia (not a full Star Alliance member) allows us to use their lounges even when we're flying them in Economy. 



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