With one qualifying week to go, I discovered in order to keep my status, I needed a walloping amount of miles and tier points. The kind of miles and tier points that come with not just a long-haul flight, but one in Business or First class. I became altogether quite obsessed by it.įor as the membership year neared its end, I became consumed with the reality of missing out on enough tier points to retain my Gold status. It would play on my mind, pop up unexpectedly and finally led me to do something which still makes me wince when I think of it. Now you’d think for someone who has pretty much stopped travelling (with the exception of annual vacations) this wouldn’t matter. Its relevance would be so minimal that it would occupy no more than a few seconds thought.
I hate to admit it, but I even felt a little smugness when I skipped the long check in queues and fast-tracked my way through security.īeing Silver had been good, but Gold, Gold was great.Ī few months after my newfound Gold status, I changed jobs. And with the change in jobs came a huge reduction in travel.įor the first time in years I found myself mostly grounded. The long speed walks on travelators through foreign airports replaced by a daily train commute through the countryside and the smell of jet fuel quickly becoming a distant memory.Īt around the same time, British Airways reconfigured how flyers earned tier points the result being you needed to either spend more on a ticket or take almost double the number of flights to get the same amount of points to keep one’s status. When the two plastic gold cards arrived to attach to my luggage, I felt a disproportionate sense of achievement. I say disproportionate because let’s face it, it wasn’t as if I’d broken some land speed record or scaled Everest, all I’d actually done was sit my arse on a plane, repeatedly.Īnd yet the next time I walked through Heathrow (with my gold tags proudly displayed on my luggage) I swear I felt I was two inches taller. The day I hit ‘Gold’ I let out a little squeal of delight. I’d made it. Over the years, like most frequent flyers, I joined an airline loyalty program (in my case British Airways Executive Club). With each trip to meet clients or undertake research, I’d happily collect my miles and at the end of each quarter, delight in seeing my ‘status’ change as I leaped through the layers of tiers, rising in their status hierarchy. (And probably others but let’s not dwell on that right now).įor years my work has resulted in me spending a huge amount of time up in the air. If you added up the hours it would probably equate to a good few months a year spent at 35,000ft. Airports were my second home and duty-free acquired sacks of peanut M&M’s a mainstay of my diet. What is it they say? Shoemakers wear the worst shoes? Well that analogy certainly applies to me in this instance. Three words that perfectly sum up something I did last year (pre-COVID), something that still confounds me whenever I think about it. Not just for how nuts it was, but also because as someone who specialises in human behaviour and marketing, I really should have known better.
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