Status Matching – The Flying Game
This is part 2 of the story, if you’ve not read my original article on status matching, read it here.
All three alliances at once
I have recently managed to achieve top level status in all three airline alliances, and without doing a huge amount of flying or spending large amount of money. Here is how I did it.
To play this game you need to be doing something called status matching, which is when an airline grants you matching status with another airline group in the hope that you might choose to fly with them instead, but you do need to have a good status with another airline group before you start, read more in my previous article here.
Background – Airline Alliances
Most airlines around the world are grouped into water called airline alliances. The three big ones are Star Alliance, One World and Sky Team. Some airlines are big enough and popular enough on their own to not have an alliance with anyone, for example Emirates, Etihad and Hawaiian have their own loyalty scheme but don’t connect with any other airlines. Alliances have all sorts of inter connections between their member airlines, for example they often have code sharing on flights and routes that to connect between multiple airlines that allow you to go to places further than your local airlines can do. Most importantly though is they share loyalty benefits, so if you are a frequent flyer with an airline in an alliance, then there are benefits which are applied to other airlines in the same alliance. For example, I have British Airways gold membership to their Executive Club, which their nominal top level (there are some special higher levels, but we’ll skip over that for now). This gives me status in the One World alliance of Emerald, which is their top level. This means whenever I fly on any One World airline, I get treated by them the same way BA treat me. In my case I get to check in at first class desks, use fast track security and enter first class lounges. Once you have a good status with an airline, it’s a really good thing to have and to make sure you still continue to fly with other alliance members so that you gain all those benefits. And of course, if you fly with other airlines in the same alliance, the points you earn get fed back to your own airline’s club. For example, when I go and fly with American Airlines I earn the same tier points on my British Airways executive club that I would if I was flying with British Airways.
Getting status in the first place
The first step in this process is to earn a good status with one airline group, as I live in London British Airways is the natural choice for me and therefore the One World alliance group is what I’m looking at (that’s all going to change in 2025, but that’s another story). In 2023 I was lucky enough that my clients needed me to fly around the world and I started earning points to get myself back up to gold status. I used a lot of tricks to make sure I was maximising the tier point potential of every trip I took. For example, if I had to fly from London to Asia, I’d fly with Qatar Airways, part of the One World alliance. They are based in Doha, so this would mean that I had to do a stopover on every flight to Asia, this dramatically increases your tier points. If I flew with the British Airways on a direct flight to Asia, I would earn less points than taking two flights, one from London to Doha, and another from Doha to Asia.
For example:
London to Singapore on British Airways, direct in business class earns you 160 tier points*.
Or
London to Doha, on Qatar, in business is 140, and Doha to Singapore in business is also 140, meaning a total of 280 tier points* for the same trip.
On top of this I took advantage of things like luxury sales on British Airways and once a year I treated myself to a first class return trip when the sales was on. To make it even better British Airways had a deal if you book a 5-day hotel or car rental along with your flight, making it an official “holiday booking”, then they will give you double the tier points. The way to make that add up is to make it a first-class trip with 5 nights in a hotel, this earnt me 800 tier points in one trip. And all for a not ridiculous amount of money. There’s a conference I go to in December in America every year, I booked a 5-night return trip on British Airways in first class and this accounted for half of the tier points I need for the entire year. There were a number of trips to Asia and the Middle East utilising Qatar for extra points. I managed to get myself well above the needed amount to get to gold on British Airways. This gave me Emerald status in the One World alliance and I was able to use that with all my other flying with airlines in One World.
*Note this is the old system, pre April 2025
Status matching
The next part of the trick is to work out which airlines are offering status matching, luckily there’s a website that does it for you, https://statusmatcher.com an amazing site that gives you real time reference information of how people are getting on with status matching. I looked through the website and found that Kenya Airways was giving out status matching and they are part of the Sky Team group. Sky team includes big airlines such as Delta, KLM, Air France and Virgin Atlantic. I contacted the team and was requested to send over proof of my status with British Airways and of course a history of my flying to show that I’m a regular flyer. This matching was approved within a few days and even though I’ll probably never get to fly on Kenya Airways, I do have now top-level Sky Team membership with them. Once you have your membership status, you don’t have to fly with a home airline that you join, you can actually fly with any airline in the alliance and enjoy the benefits. This might seem quite simple, but airlines are quite restrictive on how often they give out status matching, as it does actually cost them money. When I start using lounges and things like that that does have a long-term financial impact on them. Equally if people do what I did and never actually fly the airline then it completely ruins the point of them doing it. That’s two major alliances covered what about the third?
Star Alliance
The first place I found that was offering Star Alliance status matching was SAS airlines, the reason behind this is SAS was actually leaving the Star Alliance in September 2024 and I think they were giving out memberships not really caring, the idea being that they’ll switch them all over to Sky Team when the airline moves over. So, I applied to SAS and I was refused. They said they’ve given out all their designated number at that time. I had to give up for a few months and try again later. Around about July 2024 I heard from a friend that he successfully been given status matching with SAS, so I thought I would try again. This time I was successful and was given top level SAS membership (with no challenge issued). But this isn’t much use long-term because they’re going to change to Sky Team and I wanted my Star Alliance membership. However, as SAS was leaving Star Alliance, Lufthansa had picked up on this and were offering SAS members status matching with them to try and get people to switch them and stay in Star Alliance. I discovered that Lufthansa had set up a very specific web form for this purpose just for SAS members. My friend who done the SAS status matching tried the form and got rejected, quite cleverly picking up that his membership with SAS was actually a status match. I decided to give it a go anyway, but I was accepted.
I was looking for reasons why I was accepted and my friend was not, and I think there’s two possibilities. One, as I had had my Lufthansa and SAS accounts longer, possibly the algorithms were looking for freshly set up accounts which might be an indication of status matching. The other possible reason was I had two fights already booked with them which would’ve possibly triggered them to accept to me. Either way I now had Lufthansa top level status, called Senator status. Now I had top level in all three alliances. However, Lufthansa weren’t just going to give me endless amounts of senator status, they gave me a challenge.
A status match challenge
Sometimes when you do status matching you get issued with a challenge, that is they will give you a short membership and ask you to fly with them within that time to extend it to a much longer membership. I’ve had this on occasions before.
The first occasion was when I first ever status matched from British Airways to Star Alliance using Turkish Airlines. They gave me 3 months membership and said you can have a full year if you fly with us at least once within those 3 months, which I did.
My next status match challenge was with virgin Atlantic. They were offering status matching to British Airways customers, quite a natural choice as they are direct competition, but their deal was you had to do two flights in premium economy or above. I chose this at a time when I had a company that was going to fly me into New York in premium economy, so it was perfect timing and I earned and I earned a membership with virgin Atlantic. You can read more detail about these two in my part 1 about status matching here.
So Lufthansa issued me a challenge, they gave me six months of Senator status and offered to extend it for another year, to give me a total of 18 months membership, if I took six flights with them. This was a slightly higher challenge another airlines, but an easy one for me to do. At the time I already had two flights booked, so I just needed to find an excuse for four more. I had to go to the Middle East so it seemed like a good idea to fly the Lufthansa, as they don’t fly direct from London, I would have to fly from London to Frankfurt and change there, giving me four flights in one trip. Job done. Having been awarded status in August 2024 with expiry date of February 25, once I’d done my trip I should have membership until February 26. That might be enough time for me to earn renewal on it.
By this time my Kenya Airways membership was about to expire, but luckily SAS who offered me the top level membership was switching to Sky Team. Therefore, in September 24 I was automatically switched and I had another Sky Team membership. I even tested this out as I had a flight booked with KLM, and I had used my Kenya Airways membership number on it. I went to the chat system on the KLM website and asked if I could switch it to my SAS membership and they did, and everything remained the same, I still had priority check in, fast track security, lounge access and priority boarding etc.
Bottom line
So there you go, through a series of lucky events in the airline industry, from just flying continuously with one airline and using status matching, I managed earn top level status with all three major alliances. However, keeping it will be impossible. I would have to do a vast amount of flying to keep this status up.
2025 Update
Since the release of the new BA Exec club rules and the increased earning levels, I don’t think I’ll be able to maintain my BA Gold status. Even with the additional offers they put in place in February to try to placate people. In this instance it is very likely that status matching has actually worked on me. I am now going to aim to keep my Lufthansa status by flying, where possible, with Star Alliance airlines. Star Alliance does give me a lot of options, there’s a lot of airlines worldwide and throughout Europe I can use, so I don’t see it being a problem. I’ll keep you updated with further articles as I fly more this year.
