American isn’t the best program out there, but it’s the easiest one to gain status on without doing a ton of flying. And once you get status on it, you can then get another airline (Alaska, for example) to match it for the following year, thus giving you over two years of status for one short outlay of effort. The reason American is easy is because they offer a really cool challenge. You pay $200 to sign up, and if you earn 12,500 qualifying miles within 90 days, you will have Platinum status for the rest of the year. If you do it after June 16th, you get the rest of the current year, the
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