I travel a lot. Why? Not because I enjoy it but I need to, for my job. I am a “consultant”. And so, I travel to Chicago, Columbus, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose, Detroit…The best part of travelling a lot, especially if you are smart enough to stay with one Airline is that you get status pretty quickly. At least that what they say! So within a few months, I got my Gold status on American Airlines. I looked up excitedly about all the benefits they asked me to dream about when I first started travelling.

Free checked baggage….that’s a joke for a consultant because guess what. Even if you don’t have status and take your reasonably sized carry on or check-in baggage to the flight, they will do complimentary check-in because the first 25 passengers somehow figured out a way to fill up all the overheads by the time you started boarding…pointless!

The other most significant benefit you get is the extra miles, this can add up quickly and you can use them for award flights. Which is good if you want to take your family for a nice vacation, at least you don’t have to spend on airline tickets and you happen to have a family that loves early morning 5 AM flights or red eye flights (because all the miles you earned are not enough cover decent flights for one ass)….pointless! Of course, its not pointless if you are single, divorced or simply don’t want to travel with others, which is pointless in many ways (topic for another article).

The best benefit that they want you to dream about is automatic upgrades….ha ha ha ha….I have one single task I want you to do next time you are boarding a flight on a Monday morning or Thursday evening. On a flight with 80 passengers, you are probably somewhere on the list of 78 passengers who automatically qualified for an upgrade just like you. So the priority boarding groups are actually a long line. I sometimes envy the 2 passengers that didn’t qualify, they must be rolling over in their heads…thinking…totally pointless!

So you have airline status? I would say, shove it in your pocket and wait till a personal concierge car arrives to pick you up at your terminal. Either you are still around to see it or you can only dream on these pointless schemes that airlines ask you to enroll into.