Mid-Year Check In

We've reached the halfway point in 2015. So far it's been a pretty busy year for the Songer family. In addition to our usual long weekend trips, my father's been balancing a few different clients as well as my mother taking classes to improve her English.

I've been continuing my domination of daycare and preparing for the transition to Pre-School (which seems to be the same thing as far as I can tell).

But June 30th is always a good check in point to see how we're tracking for our annual goals of elite status qualifications for our favorite hotel and airline programs.

Starwood SPG Platinum

Platinum status with Starwood is probably our most useful status. We have had it the past 2 years, and we really get value from our hotel room upgrades, complimentary breakfasts, lounge access and a variety of other perks.

As of today, we're well on our way to hitting the minimum of 25 stays (our Sheraton Brussels Airport stay was our 20th after including the 4 stay credits we get from having Starwood Amex credit cards).

Plus, this July 4th weekend, we'll have another 2 stays bringing our YTD total to 22 stays. So chance are, we'll hit 25 stays before December 31st. However, we're only at 34 nights (soon to be 36 after this weekend). Nevertheless, we only need either 25 stays OR 50 nights to re-qualify for SPG Platinum.

Some Starwood properties we've enjoyed so far in 2015 include:

- Westin Disney Swan
- Westin Lagunamar Cancun
- Sheraton Kansas City
- Sheraton Brussels

Of course, hitting 50 nights this year will earn us another 10 Suite Night Awards (SNA) to use for 2016. We actually still have 9 of our SNA's that we earned last year, but having more is always nice just in case we wanted to use them for multiple long stays over the next 12 months.

United MileagePlus Gold

My father has had United Gold status for the past several years, ever since he started flying back and forth to Israel (which gets him almost 11,000 Elite Qualifying Miles round trip).

However, to qualify for Gold, he needs to hit 50,000 EQM. For being a United Gold member, we receive access to Economy+ seating at booking, international airport lounge access, free same-day changes and the occasional flight upgrade, in addition to Priority Check-In at Business Class counters, Priority Baggage treatment, etc.

He can earn up to 5,000 EQM from his Chase United Select credit card each year if he spends $5,000 on United.com, but that's still 45,000 EQM he needs from actual flights each year. So far, after our flight back from Tel Aviv last week, he's at just 24,658 EQM - just short of achieving United Silver status (25,000 EQM). So at the halfway point, it looks like we're at the halfway point to Gold.

Unfortunately, however, it looks like we'll fall short this year as we don't have any long flights coming up in the second half of 2015 as my mother's been adamant about shorter domestic trips within the United States. It also didn't help that we overslept one morning and missed our United flight to Kansas City and had to rebook using United miles (which didn't earn us any elite qualification credit for that trip).