I&#x27;ve been Executive Platinum (top published tier) on AA since the merger (came in as Chairman&#x27;s Preferred with US Airways).<p>AA similarly has a &quot;secret&quot; invite-only level above that -- Concierge Key -- and rumors about how they decide who to invite into it (not so secretive: people who spend lots of money, and probably people who have influence over the travel contracts of large companies). Never been a CK, likely never will be. The game was interesting for a while, but now I just have a harder time caring.<p>Personally I look at it as a cyclic thing. When the economy&#x27;s in the tubes, airlines lavish benefits on frequent business travelers because the rest of the country isn&#x27;t flying. When the economy picks up again and people start buying flights to Disney for their vacations again, the benefits get slashed.<p>Right now we&#x27;re in a slash&#x2F;devalue period. Last year I &quot;only&quot; put a bit over 50k miles to AA, which will drop me to Platinum with them at the end of the month when 2015 status expires, picked up Platinum on Delta as a hedge, and went on a spending spree using up my system-wide upgrades. Flew myself in business class to Europe and back multiple times, flew myself and someone else to Hawaii in first, gave a co-worker a business-class upgrade on JFK-SFO, etc.<p>Irony is, of course, that last month I moved and now work in SF, and UA is the only one of the big three I <i>don&#x27;t</i> have some kind of useful status with. But living near where I work also means less need to travel, so I&#x27;ll probably just buy tickets by schedule&#x2F;price from here on out. DL in particular is nice about cheap first-class fares since they want to fill the front cabin with people who paid rather than people using frequent-flyer perks.