Keeping Loyalty Status

Last week I received an e-mail from a major hotel chain letting me know I had 5 more nights I need to stay to keep my current loyalty level. I know I will be traveling later this month and will achieve 2 of those nights. The question is if I should book a 3-night stay somewhere and make a long weekend of it with my wife?

When I flew every week to go to the Bay Area for work, if I found myself falling short of a certain level, I would book evening flights to someplace cheap. Usually I would take stock of travel for the rest of the year sometime in October. If I didn't have the required segments reserved to keep my status on Alaska Airlines, I would start booking evening round-trip flights to someplace really cheap. Usually that meant I would fly to Orange County or Los Angeles from San Francisco. Most of the time I would be in those cities for a total of 30 minutes before boarding a new plane and going back to San Francisco. I remember only paying $100 for the round trip and always had a first class seat because of my status.

Once I achieved that airline status, it came with some pretty important perks. The most important perk is that I could upgrade to first class a week before the flight. I also got something like 100,000 miles to use for future travel. That more than covered the $300 or so to achieve the status I wanted. It worked out well.

I mentioned that I need 3 more nights at a specific hotel chain to my wife and she asked me where we planned to go this weekend. I told her we could go stay someplace local that has a pool and invite the grand kids to join us. She thought that to be a boring idea and suggested we catch a flight to Hawaii and have an extravagant weekend.  That idea has merit and so I did a quick search. Last-minute plane tickets to Honolulu are about $1300 for the two of us and the hotel will run us about $900. So for $2200 I can keep my loyalty status and have a really epic weekend. Or . . . I could spend $330 over the next 2 months staying at a lackluster hotel close to home.

While the epic weekend sound like a lot of fun, I would much rather use that money for an epic vacation with a bit more prep time. I got an e-mail this morning from a Cruise ship company and we can do a 7-day cruise to Alaska with an Ocean-view room for $2200. Of course the other option is to let my status drop one level and not pay a dime. Decisions, decisions.