Emirates has recently sent an email to all of their Skywards members, announcing a promotion where you can get Skywards Gold status with a single business class roundtrip. There are, of course, many conditions written in the fine print which we will discuss in this article. Nevertheless, this might be one of the easiest ways to get a 1-year valid Skywards Gold status.
Table of contents
Skywards Gold benefits
First, let’s look at what benefits the Skywards Gold status will get you:
- Special members-only offers
- Complimentary seat selection
- 2 x 23 kg of luggage, even when traveling in economy class
- Waitlist priority
- Bonus Skywards miles
- Priority hotline
- Guaranteed seats
- Priority check-in and boarding
- Lounge access
- Onboard Wi-Fi
- Priority baggage delivery
Especially the lounge access will be appealing to many travelers. Usually, you’d need 50,000 miles to get this status. Sadly, as Emirates isn’t part of any alliance, this status will only give you benefits when flying with Emirates or flydubai.
Terms & Conditions
Here’s where things get a bit tricky. First, there are some straightforward conditions:
- You must purchase the tickets between July 18th and July 26th.
- You must fly between July 18th and August 20th, 2019
- Business Class SPECIAL and SAVER fare classes are not eligible
BEFORE booking, you first need to register for this promotion. If you’re already a member, you need to click on the link of the email that you should have gotten. If you’re not, you need to create a Skywards account and contact an Emirates Contact Center to register (we’d recommend doing this as quickly as possible).
Now comes the challenging part. Flights with Dubai as a final destination (or port of departure) are not eligible. Also, most 5th-freedom flights aren’t eligible either (e.g. Larnaca-Malta).
We’ve mapped out the cities, where the trips have to start and end (feel free to zoom into the more crowded areas by scrolling while keeping ctrl pressed):
You’d always fly from one of those cities to Dubai, and then continue to another one of those cities.
Booking example
As you can imagine, there are many different combinations you can make between all of those cities. Here is one example:
Because you are not allowed to select the SAVER fare, these tickets sadly will not be cheap. Nevertheless, these Business Flex flights from Madrid to Singapore would usually give you around 20,000 miles. That’s not even half of what’s needed for the Skywards Gold status if you try to get it the conventional way.
Summary
Buying these last-minute business class tickets will definitively not be cheap, as you can sadly only book the Flex or Flex Plus fares. It is however by far the easiest way to reach the Skywards Gold status, as you’d usually need more than two of those flights to reach 50,000 miles. However, be very careful to select a route based on the city-restrictions that are mentioned in the fine print. If you have doubts, it may be wise to contact Emirates before booking.
Source: LoyaltyLobby – Thanks!