Four years ago I worked for a company that had global HQ in Zurich, Switzerland. Yes, this was a huge perk. And probably the only perk of the job. Anyway, I traveled to Zurich, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, France and the UK in 6 different trips over an 8 month time period in 2010. Needless to say, I was never home. It was pretty amazing how it worked out since Matt was living/working in Luxembourg at his company European HQ for 10 months. We saw each other more often in Europe than we did in Ohio (he was living in Cleveland, I was living in Columbus).
Due to all these trips, I made sure to fly the same family of airlines (Star Alliance) so I could get tons of miles. By the end of the year I had 49,500 miles. 500 miles short of Gold status. If you don't know what Gold status is on an airline, it's pretty much the bomb. Premier Check-In, Free Checked bags (2), Premier security line, Premier Boarding, additional bonus miles, free upgrades, etc. So I was VERY unhappy that I was so close to getting Gold status but was 500 miles short. Mid January 2011 I received an email saying they automatically bumped me to Gold - yahoo! Unfortunately I didn't travel as much as I had hoped in 2011 so I didn't get to take advantage of it as much as I would have liked to, but it was still very exciting (except that United had some glitch and thought I was Gold status until.. well they still think I am.. Oops! :) ).
The best time we had with Gold status was our Costa Rica trip in May 2012. We flew United from DEN-IAH-SJO. We had a two hour layover in Houston and were hoping to get into the United Lounge. As I just mentioned, United thinks I'm still "Star Gold" status (side note: I'm flying United tomorrow, crossing my finger they still have a glitch in their system). The status definitely was up in February 2012, but for some reason every time I've flown Untied since then, "Star Gold" is printed on my boarding pass. Please, don't tell them. I like cutting the security line.
I have a "Star Gold" card, but it has the expiration date on it so I didn't bother to bring it on our trip to CR. We walked into the United Lounge and I handed over my boarding pass and said we would like to enter the lounge. They checked to make sure Gold Status was on our boarding passes and voila - we were in! We rode the escalator up to the lounge and were greeted with free newspapers and a very friendly environment. We immediately found our way over to the bar area and started enjoying their complimentary selection of beer, wine, and munchies (pretzels, trail mix, cheese, etc.). It was the perfect way to start our trip to Costa Rica!
Once I realized I had 50K miles with Star Alliance in 2010, it hit me that I needed to save all the miles for our honeymoon! I opened up a credit card that had 35K bonus miles and additional miles for every transaction. By the time we got engaged, I had nearly 140K miles with US Airways.
This really helped us with our honeymoon planning!
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