How to Track and Keep Elite Status Across Every Programme (2026)

If you hold elite status with two or three airlines and a couple of hotel chains, the hardest part is not earning it. It is keeping track of it all at once: different thresholds, different clocks, and a renewal date you remember only after missing it. This guide is a practical framework for every programme you hold.

Why cross-programme status is so easy to lose

A single airline app is excellent at one thing: showing you where you stand in that one programme. The problem is that a frequent traveller rarely lives in one programme. You might be chasing Gold with one alliance, sitting on mid-tier hotel status with two chains, and quietly letting a third programme lapse without deciding to. No native app shows you that whole picture, and a spreadsheet is out of date by the next Sunday night.

The result is a familiar pattern. You assume you are safe, the qualification year closes, and the email that tells you that you fell short arrives when there is nothing left to do about it. The complexity is not your imagination: airline loyalty programmes have grown opaque enough that the US Department of Transportation opened a review of how they treat members. The fix is not more willpower. It is a single, honest view of every programme, plus a way to see the finish line before you reach it.

Every programme counts qualification differently

The first thing to accept is that there is no shared currency for status. Each programme measures qualification its own way, and the thresholds are not comparable across programmes:

• Loyalty Points: American AAdvantage qualifies status on Loyalty Points, with Gold at 40,000, Platinum at 75,000, Platinum Pro at 125,000, and Executive Platinum at 200,000 in the calendar year.
• Premier Qualifying Points: United MileagePlus uses PQP, with Premier Silver at 5,000, Gold at 10,000, Platinum at 18,000, and 1K at 28,000.
• Tier Points: The British Airways Club runs on Tier Points across an April to March year, with Bronze at 3,500, Silver at 7,500, Gold at 20,000, and Gold Guest List at 65,000.
• Experience Points: Air France-KLM Flying Blue uses XP on a rolling 12-month basis, with Silver at 100, Gold at 180, Platinum at 300, and Ultimate at 1,500.
• Qualifying nights: hotels mostly count nights. Marriott Bonvoy sets Platinum at 50 nights and Titanium at 75; Hilton Honors sets Diamond at 50; and World of Hyatt sets Globalist at 60.

That alone explains why people lose track. Holding tier points, Loyalty Points, PQPs, XP, MQDs and qualifying nights in your head at once is not realistic, and the qualification years do not even start on the same date. For a plain-English breakdown of each one, see our guide to status currencies, and for the exact maths of a single programme, the per-tier trackers such as the Marriott Bonvoy Platinum tracker or the United 1K tracker show your distance to the line.

The fix: one view, plus a renewal forecast

Two things turn a pile of scattered balances into a decision. The first is consolidation: every programme on one screen, each shown in its own unit, with status progress and your redeemable balance side by side. The second, and the one most tools skip, is a renewal forecast: taking the trips you have already booked and projecting where each programme lands at year end.

This is the gap a cross-programme tracker is built to close. A tool like Miles Mosaic folds your booked trips into a projection for each programme you track and tells you, in plain terms, whether you will retain your tier, climb to the next, or fall short, and by how much. Because it is based on the activity you enter rather than a scrape of your accounts, the picture is complete and private: there is no loyalty password to share.

A four-step routine that takes about fifteen minutes

You do not need a complicated system. You need a repeatable one. Run this once when you set up, then for a few minutes each month:

1. List what you actually hold. Write down every airline and hotel programme where you have status, are one tier away, or have a balance worth protecting. Most people are surprised it is more than they thought.
2. Centralise the numbers. For each programme, record your current qualifying total (tier points, Loyalty Points, nights, and so on) and your renewal date. Enter them by hand, or upload a confirmation email or PDF so the tool reads them for you.
3. Forecast the year. Add the trips you have already booked and look at the projected year-end result per programme. This is where you find the shortfall while you can still close it.
4. Act on the one that matters. Most months the answer is to do nothing. Occasionally it is a single, specific move: credit one trip to a different programme, add a night to an existing stay, or decide to let a tier go.

Airline status thresholds at a glance (2026)

Use this as a quick reference, then check the programme’s own terms before you make a decision, because thresholds do change. Figures below were verified against the programmes’ official pages in 2026.

• American AAdvantage: Gold 40k, Platinum 75k, Platinum Pro 125k, Executive Platinum 200k Loyalty Points (calendar year). See the AAdvantage Platinum tracker.
• United MileagePlus: Silver 5k, Gold 10k, Platinum 18k, 1K 28k PQP (calendar year).
• Delta SkyMiles: Medallion tiers qualify on Medallion Qualification Dollars; confirm the current figures on Delta’s qualification page. See the Delta Platinum tracker.
• British Airways Club: Bronze 3,500, Silver 7,500, Gold 20,000 Tier Points (April to March).
• Flying Blue: Silver 100, Gold 180, Platinum 300 XP (rolling 12 months). See the Flying Blue Gold tracker.

Hotel status thresholds at a glance (2026)

Hotels are simpler because most of them count nights, but the qualifying-night definitions and the value of each tier differ a lot. We cover the detail in how hotel elite nights are counted.

• Marriott Bonvoy: Silver 10, Gold 25, Platinum 50, Titanium 75, Ambassador 100 nights plus at least USD 23,000 in qualifying spend.
• Hilton Honors: Silver 10, Gold 25, Diamond 50 nights.
• World of Hyatt: Discoverist 10, Explorist 30, Globalist 60 nights.
• IHG One Rewards: Silver 10, Gold 20, Platinum 40, Diamond 70 nights.
• Accor ALL: Silver 10, Gold 30, Platinum 60, Diamond 100 nights.

The qualification calendars do not line up

Timing is the quiet trap. Most US airline programmes and the major hotel chains qualify on a calendar year, so the clock resets on 1 January. But the British Airways Club runs an April to March year, Flying Blue works on a rolling 12 months that moves every day, and several programmes use a personal membership year tied to when you joined. If you treat them all as ending in December, you will miss deadlines that fell in March or that quietly move under your feet.

This matters most in the back half of each programme’s year, when a single booked trip can be the difference between retaining a tier and dropping out of it. The practical habit is to record each programme’s renewal date next to its qualifying total, so your view tells you not just how far you are from the line but how long you have to get there. We map every major programme’s reset in the status qualification calendar.

Where you credit a trip changes everything

One flight is not worth the same to every programme. Because alliance partners credit qualifying activity at different rates, the same long-haul ticket can move you meaningfully closer to a tier in one programme and barely register in another. The same is true for hotel stays booked through different channels. Deciding where to credit a trip before you fly is one of the highest-leverage moves in the whole game, and it is invisible if you are only looking at one programme at a time.

This is exactly the kind of decision a cross-programme forecast is built to answer: it can show what a booked trip does to each status at once, so you send the credit where it actually changes an outcome. We walk through it in will your booked trips keep your status.

When to chase, and when to let go

A cross-programme view makes one uncomfortable decision easier: which tiers are not worth defending. Status only pays when the benefits you genuinely use are worth more than the spend or flying it takes to requalify. Mid-tier status, in particular, is frequently a trap, because the marginal benefits are thin while the cost of defending it is real. We work through the honest maths in when to stop chasing status. The discipline is to decide on purpose, rather than drift into an expensive requalification you never chose.

Do not forget expiry

Status renewal is only half the clock. Your redeemable miles and points have their own expiry rules, and they are unforgiving. Several programmes reset an inactivity clock with any qualifying activity, but the windows vary, and a large balance can quietly evaporate. The same single view that tracks status should surface what is expiring next, ranked by risk, so a forgotten clock never costs you a balance you earned.

The bottom line

You cannot keep status you cannot see. The travellers who hold onto their tiers, and who stop paying to defend the ones that are not worth it, are not working harder; they are simply looking at the whole board at once and acting in time. Put every programme in one place, forecast the year from the trips you have already booked, and make the one move that matters. If you want a tool built for exactly that, you can start tracking for free and add the programmes you already hold.