Following on from my Gold qualification in May 2025 I had 87XP to carry forward.
My requalification date had now been reset. I qualified on 4th May which worked perfectly because I had Gold Status and the requalification date showed 31st May 2026. I had almost 13 months to requalify for Gold
So the question was how do I requalify for Gold, and the dashboard on flying Blue clearly showed I would need 180XP – with 87XP carried forward I needed 93XP to secure Gold until the end of May 2027.
Flying to USA would give me a chunk of XP but how much? I had purchased SAF on this flight because I had expected to need it to qualify for Gold for the first time. So here is what the flights to USA produced.
Overall you can see this gave 101XP so my running total was sitting at 188XP and I had already requalified as Gold which meant I would retain Gold until the end of May 2027! I only actually needed 112XP before the end of May 2026 to reach the 300XP required to upgrade from Gold to Platinum.
After getting back from the long trip for the wedding in the USA we felt like we were missing travelling so I looked around for a way to grab some XP for us both with a short European trip like the ones we took in Spain and Greece earlier in the year. Portugal came through as a pretty cheap option.
The trip was around £170 each for 20XP (my usual metric is Euro/XP) or 9.6€/XP. I generally consider anything under €10/XP good value as the SAF contributions come in at €10/XP. I figure that if I can fly for the same cost as buying SAF then flying is the better option.
I also found that I had been given 5XP from the Accor ALL/Flying Blue promotion I signed up for in March
The next XP came from a solo trip. I had to get back from Istanbul after taking a Turkish Airlines flight to extend my *G Status to July 2026. There was a cheap option Flying with KLM for the return flight to BHX from IST Via AMS 2 segments so 10XP
I also bought some SAF for this which bought the total cost to £126.80 for 16XP. €8.9/XP which I was pretty happy about although you can see in my video about spending the night at Schiphol that it wasn’t perfect!
At this point I was sitting at 229XP which was 49XP into a further year’s requalification. BUT another 71XP would be enough to qualify for Platinum!
Out of the Blue we found ourselves back in the USA in October. I had found a cheap transatlantic crossing on QM2 – yes I am working on the video – It disembarks in New York so we took a short flight with Delta to Charleston
So this is where I sit right now
I have 2 trips coming up. One is to Helsinki.
Its a rescheduled J flight Outbound and an Economy flight Inbound
This will bring in
30XP for the BHX-AMS-HEL (Outbound )
10XP for the HEL-AMS-BHX (Inbound)
Clearly this flight doesnt fit in with my cost criteria as its way over €14.4/XP. Ive yet to decide whether I need to add a SAF contribution. But I’ll likely 7XP each, which will bring the average cost/XP down to €13.7/XP
My other planned trip is to Dublin but as I’ve booked these with Virgin Miles I’ll get no XP and can’t add SAF to these as they appear on FB system as booked through an agent, to buy SAF they must be booked on KLM or AF sites.
I would prefer not to buy SAF anyway so I’m hoping to sort out another trip before the end of March which will get the XP we need. I’ll still need 29XP and Anth will need 28XP for her upgrade to Gold which needs to happen before March 31st.
With hindsight, it is probably not cost effective to chase Platinum status at all or even Gold Status.
The upside is that after March 2026 we can let out status soft-land to the next tier down each year.
Anth will Get 1 Year of Silver expiring March 2028 and
I will get 1 year of Gold followed by one year of Silver expiring some time before June 2029