"effectively reducing the number of miles to earn Gold, Platinum and Executive Platinum to 12.5, 25 and 50K respectively"

woah, woah, woah... not so fast there. I don't know about you, but there aren't many people that can rack up 50K miles in-seat in a span of less than three months (the duration of the promotion) aside from the people that were going to hit EXP anyway. This doesn't effectively reduce the qualifying mileage unless someone is planning on doing a LOT of flying between April 18th and June 15th.

What this does do, is give people like me who were on the cusp of being able to hit a certain tier by the end of the year the extra "bump" to get there. With this promotion and my regular travel schedule, if I mix in one trip to London before the year is out, I'll make EXP. Without the promotion, I'd be one of the higher mileage PLT's, possibly rewarded for my fruitless quest for EXP with some bonus luggage tags or extra stickers (which I can't use anyway).

I just hope this doesn't water down the pool even further. The flight I take to Atlanta each week already has probably 30% of the plane taken up by elites. Those special seats (exit rows, 7D on the MD-80, etc.) and upgrades are becoming harder and harder to come by, even as a PLT. I haven't been upgraded once in the past 3 months even though I put in the request twice a week.

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