Loyalty isn’t dead—at least not for these road warriors with top-tier, hush-hush status
4 min
Bonnie Crawford was in danger of missing a connecting flight to Toronto for a board meeting last week when a United Airlines customer-service representative saved the day. She got rebooked on a pricey nonstop flight on Air Canada in business class. For free.
You’re probably thinking, “No airline ever does that for me.” Crawford isn’t just any frequent flier. The chief customer officer for a software company and Portland, Ore., resident has United’s invitation-only Global Services status.
It’s a semi-secret, status-on-steroids level that big spenders strive for every year. American and Delta have souped-up statuses, too, with similarly haughty names: ConciergeKey and Delta 360°. The airlines don’t like to talk about what it takes to snag an invite, how many people have such status or even the perks. Even the high rollers themselves don’t know for sure.
Get into these exclusive clubs and you get customer service on speed dial, flight rebooking before you even know there’s trouble, lounge access and priority for upgrades. Not to mention bragging rights and swag. People even post unboxing videos of their invites on YouTube.
Anyone with this super status needn’t fret about the value of airline loyalty or the devaluation of frequent-flier points.
Crawford was invited to Global Services for 2017 and was hooked. “It was the first taste of this magic, elusive, absolutely incredible status,’’ she says. She wasn’t invited again until this year and fears she won’t be invited back next year due to fewer costly international flights in her new job.
Airlines don’t publish qualifications for Global Services, Delta 360° or ConciergeKey. That doesn’t stop road warriors from speculating in online forums about the required spending levels ($50,000-plus a year is mentioned a lot) and travel patterns (lots of high-cost international flights in premium cabins on the airline, not partner carriers).
Complicating matters: Some airlines bestow the status as part of a corporate contract, with companies allowed to pick their nominees.
Scott Chandler , senior vice president of revenue management and loyalty at American Airlines , won’t divulge any metrics. He says American devotes a significant amount of time and resources to its coveted ConciergeKey program because the travelers are the airline’s most valuable. Delta and United declined interview requests and didn’t share any info beyond statements about the programs’ exclusivity.
Chandler says fliers can reach ConciergeKey status through a combination of spending on American flights, shopping portals and credit cards. How much? He wouldn’t spill or confirm the $50,000 guesstimates. He says the makeup of the membership is broader than most people think.
“They’re basically interacting with American on a daily basis, not just when they’re flying,’’ he says.
Steve Giordano of Cherry Hill, N.J., is a managing director of a flight test and aircraft delivery company that shuttles pilots to or from assignments around the globe. The company spends up to $2.5 million on airfare every year, and he has been ConciergeKey for several years. He remembers once when the dedicated customer-service desk alerted him to a cancellation in Dublin before the flight’s pilots even knew. (He was friends with the pilot.)
In April, the airline told him he didn’t qualify for this year. He says he wasn’t too disappointed because he flies United more and has Global Services status. Giordano says he noticed ConciergeKey service slipping. On a vacation to Colombia earlier this year, he says the dedicated customer-service line and a gate agent were no help getting him home after a series of flight issues. He complained and received a form letter back. A spokeswoman says the airline sees higher satisfaction scores from ConciergeKey members than any other customer group.
In May, the airline sent him an email renewing his status after all. American is suffering through a self-induced business travel slump and working to woo back travellers .
Giordano has also taken advantage of chauffeured drives in luxury cars to the gate during a tight connection. In Houston, United escorted him and his business partner down the stairs to the tarmac and drove them in a Jaguar to their next plane. Delta uses a Porsche , American an SUV.
“CBS Mornings” co-host Gayle King has ConciergeKey and hitched a ride like that in April and thanked the American Airlines employees who helped her in an Instagram post .
Those transfers are far from routine. Travellers with the status say the most prized perk is quick help when flight troubles of any kind arise.
A senior partner with a major consulting firm who has earned status in all three programs says a United Global Services representative called him on his way to the airport a few weeks ago after noticing that he hadn’t arrived for his flight. The cutoff time for losing his seat was approaching. They saved his seat after he confirmed he was en route.
In Charlotte, N.C., last week, as the executive was sprinting to his connecting flight, a ConciergeKey representative called the airport to make sure the gate agent knew he was coming. Boarding had ended. He got on the plane.
“That’s the stuff that makes the difference,’’ he says. “That’s the s—t that gets you home.’’
There is a limit, of course.
“They don’t hold the plane,’’ he says. “If they know you’re coming, they might not shut the door as quickly.’’
Much to his parents’ chagrin, he can’t play the super-status card to help others. And all the status in the world can’t overcome weather, air-traffic delays or missing crews.
Kim Anderson , chief executive of an online lending company, is a longtime Delta loyalist who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Before his Delta 360° invite, Anderson had seen other travellers with the 360 bag tag on their backpacks and asked a few employees about the status over the years, but didn’t know much more. He travels a few times a month, buys extra-legroom seats or better, regularly buys a Sky Club membership and has an American Express card he uses to transfer miles to Delta. He estimates he racked up 200,000 Delta miles a year for the past few years.
Anderson was still surprised to find an invitation in his inbox a couple of years ago and says he hasn’t cracked the code.
“If I knew that, I’d put it in a bottle and sell it on Amazon ,’’ he says. He got a repeat invite this year.
Anderson says the customer service is over the top. He fired off an email complaint about rushed in-flight service in first class on a recent flight and had an answer—and bonus frequent-flier miles—before he landed.
“Those are not their trainees, I can tell you that,’’ he says.
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A haven for hedge-fund titans and Hollywood grandees, Greenwich is one of the world’s most expensive residential enclaves, where eye-watering prices meet unapologetic grandeur.
Their careers spanned the personal computing, internet and smartphone waves. But some older workers see AI’s arrival as the cue to exit.
4 min
Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.
So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.
“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.
It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.
“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.
After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.
The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.
But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.
They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.
Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.
“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.
“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”
“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”
Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.
When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.
The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.
It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.
He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.
In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.
About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.
In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.
About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.
Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.
“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.
Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.
Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.
So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.
When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.
“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.
It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.
Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.
“The opposite of AI,” she said.
Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.
“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.
Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.
His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.
Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.
“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.
“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”
