If you fly and qualify for American Airlines Advantage status, you should check the elite qualification tracking closely, you may be missing out.
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Elite Qualification Calendar
Every year, frequent flyers qualify for status (or don’t) in an airline’s loyalty program based on a combination of flying and qualifying activity. This could be hotel stays, purchases from airline credit cards, or in the case of American Airlines (and Southwest), purchases made through its shopping portal.
All US carrier follow the same qualification period, January 1st through December 31st with the exception of just one airline: American. Its calculations run March 1st to February 28/29 (depending on the year).
American has been exceedingly clear that any transactions or elite qualifying activity that are dated by the last day of February count toward the year’s tabulation. For example, if a purchase posted to an American Airlines credit card on February 28th, 2025 for example, it would still count toward 2024 earning and not 2025. This is a problem, however, as it means there is often mixed qualifying years with some transactions on a March statement valid for the year prior, other for the current year. Other airlines have this issue as well, but none have had to make such clear statements on the topic nor seem to have the same sorting process in practice.
Delayed Reporting
The end-of-year reporting can take an additional period to post. Reports can be found online but sharing my own experience, final qualification didn’t appear until April, confirmed as normal by an American Airlines Executive Platinum support agent. In fact, final tabulations can extend to April 20th, as they did this year.
Significantly delayed reporting such as this has material detrimental effects for flyers. Among them, if a flyer were to qualify for status at the end of February, they may remain ineligible for benefits such as preferred seating, first class upgrades, reduced mileage co-pays, lounge access, etc.
However, another problem arose in my own situation. At the start of February, I was short of the 250,000 Loyalty Point threshold required for additional milestone benefits but earned them during the month and before the deadline. I waited the extended period and called in, only to be told that it could be up to April 20th but no activity had been reported for February at all.
Worst of all, the initial response from the support staff member I spoke with was “this is too far back, and we can’t make adjustments now.” I obviously pressed forward on a resolution as I was waiting for their reporting period to conclude. Following their protocol shouldn’t result in a penalty for me.
How To Fix
April 20th came and went without the adjustment made, another call to the Executive Platinum desk resulted in submission of a credit card statement demonstrating the amount due and was submitted to additional management with a new deadline of May 7th for a result (approximately two weeks.) However, March activity had taken the February qualifications and moved them forward into 2025. As this shorted me a pair of eVIPs, it was important that they were credited to the prior year and the qualification activity was split correctly.
Plainly, there’s no excuse for waiting 51 calendar days for activity to post, only to wait another 14 days to correct it. The other carriers don’t seem to have the same issue according to online accounts from other frequent flyers, though none of the programs have officially reported success or failure with tabulation.
As a flyer, my fix was fairly simple as I was monitoring my account closely and had access to straight forward, third-party information in a single statement. But for others that may have qualified through a variety of mechanisms including hotel bookings and online transactions, sending a spreadsheet with earning dates and amounts won’t serve as adequate sourcing. Rather, confirmation emails, account payment posting, and tracking will be necessary to verify qualification metrics if in a similar situation.
American has three additional options to make this simpler.
- Force an end-of-year reconciliation period for bank co-brand partners. This could be harder than it seems as it’s the banks that contract with cardholders, not airlines.
- Update technical systems to sweep for end of year activity.
- Utilize AI to identify issues and suggest a resolution for staff to enact. For example, if AI evaluated my account at the end of the year, it would notice there was a missing statement. A secondary action might force analysis of regular contributors to my mileage account and noticed there was one missing. A tertiary action would analyze the missing credit card statement, check to see if I had shut down the card, and if not, look at the statement and compare results to my Advantage account.
In the last case, this is essentially what the manual process was with me acting as the first and secondary AI with a customer support rep acting as second (jointly to agree) and third to process the adjustments.
It seems incredibly unlikely that this should be a manual process at all in the modern era, let alone that it should be reliant on the flyer to identify the issue and begin a resolution.
Conclusion
If I was less confident I would requalify, I might have been smarter to leave it alone and expedite qualification for 2025. As I believe I will again qualify from a combination of flying activity and card spend it makes sense to get it properly apportioned. However, if Advantage ran a true-up accounting of my activity it might make the adjustment later on anyway, but my experience suggests that’s unlikely. As always, ensure you check your miles, points, and transactions and then hold the programs to account when they don’t do the same.
What do you think?
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