Here’s how opening one hotel credit card can give you elite status in 5+ hotel programs

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The idea of hotel elite status is great. You get preferential treatment like upgraded rooms and free breakfast. You earn more points for your stay than less savvy travelers. In some cases, you’ll get annoying fees like daily parking waived.

But earning elite status, particularly top-tier status, isn’t always easy. Elite status also handcuffs you to one specific hotel chain if you want to reap the benefits of your status. That blows, because sometimes other hotel chains offer better deals in better locations for your upcoming trip.

What if you could earn one elite status and turn it into elite status with a whole bunch of hotel chains? It’s quite easy to do. In fact, you could simply open a hotel credit card that offers automatic elite status and parlay that into multiple elite statuses. I’ll show you how.

How to status match elite status

The hotel industry is cutthroat. Hotels continually devise strategies to poach your business from their competitors. One famous strategy is offering customers with elite status in a rival program the opportunity to freely receive elite status in their own program.

For example, if you tell Hilton that you have Marriott Platinum status, they know you must stay at hotels frequently. They might be (and probably are) willing to give you their top-tier Diamond status to woo you away from Marriott and spend your money on them, instead.

I booked a hotel in Oregon for later this year. I later realized the hotel brand is under the Best Western umbrella. I immediately sent a message to Best Western letting them know I have Marriott Platinum status, and I’d like to status match. Within hours they had emailed me back confirming I now have their highest elite status, which normally requires 50 nights or 40 stays to achieve.

There’s a very helpful site called StatusMatcher. This site crowdsources data points from travelers who share the results of their status match attempts, and provide details that help you to status match, yourself.

Below are the four biggest hotel loyalty programs, along with helpful data points from StatusMatcher from the past few years.

Marriott Bonvoy

Hilton Honors

Hyatt

IHG

How would this work in practice?

With just a single elite status, you can scoop up quite a few statuses in other programs. It’s a snowball effect.

For example, Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant™ American Express® Card comes with automatic Marriott Gold elite status. According to the above charts:

• You should be able to match that to Hilton Gold and IHG Platinum
• You can then match Hilton Gold status to Best Western Diamond and Wyndham Diamond
• You can match IHG Platinum with Choice Privileges Platinum, La Quinta Returns Elite, Radisson Rewards Gold, and possibly Hilton Diamond
• If you manage to match to Hilton Diamond, you can then match to Caesars Rewards Diamond

Poof! You’ve got varying levels of elite status with up to eight different programs — just from opening one credit card. Without status matching or hotel credit cards, you’d have to stay a total of 244 nights to earn all these statuses:

• Marriott Gold – earned after 25 nights
• Hilton Gold – earned after 40 nights
• IHG Platinum – earned after 40 nights
• Best Western Diamond – earned after 50 nights
• Wyndham Diamond – earned after 24 nights
• Choice Privileges Platinum – earned after 15 nights
• Radisson Rewards Gold – earned after 30 nights

Again, your results may vary, and the above strategy isn’t guaranteed. Hotel programs are occasionally unwilling to extend any kind of “free” status. Other times you may be offered a status challenge, which provides you temporary elite status with the opportunity to keep it if you complete a certain amount of stays in a specific time frame.

Note that you MAY have to provide proof of recent stays to finalize some status matches.

Bottom line

Status matching allows you reap elite status benefits with just about any hotel chain without the need to stay loyal to one status. You can pick the hotel that best fits your travel plans instead of pigeon-holing yourself into staying with one brand.

You can earn handfuls of statuses just from opening one credit card! Below are some cards that come with automatic elite status which will get the snowball rolling on your elite statuses:

• Hilton Honors American Express Aspire Card – Hilton Diamond status
• IHG® Rewards Premier Credit Card – IHG Platinum status
• The World Of Hyatt Credit Card – Hyatt Discoverist status
• Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant™ American Express® Card – Marriott Gold status
• The Platinum Card® from American Express – Marriott Gold status and Hilton Gold status

Let us know if you have any good data points from status matching! We’ll add it to the above tables if we missed one. And subscribe to our newsletter for more travel tricks like this delivered to your inbox once per day.

Featured image by Joseph Hostetler/Million Mile Secrets