Until July 5, ASMALLWORLD is offering our readers a free trial month of their Premium Membership. With this Premium Membership, you can easily book Virtuoso/Impresario rates at many luxury hotels directly online.
We want to highlight another key benefit here: you will get GHA Discovery Gold hotel status for one year (GHA includes NH Hotels, Kempinski, Pan Pacific, and many more). Even if you never stay at any of these hotels, the status could come in handy in the future for a status match.
Claiming Your GHA Gold Status
The first step is to grab your free trial month. We have described how this works in detail here:
Once you have your Premium Membership, simply click on PRIVILEGES at the top:
Then, click on GHA DISCOVERY under Hotels & resorts:
After that, all you need to do is click on REDEEM NOW on the right-hand side:
From there, you will be redirected to the GHA Discovery page, where you can either log in with your existing GHA account or create a new one:
And just like that, you have Gold status valid through December 2027:
Benefits of GHA Gold Status
The benefits of GHA Gold status are admittedly quite weak. In essence, you receive 5% cashback instead of 4%, and that is about it. The program only starts getting interesting at Platinum status (requiring 10 nights or stays at 2 hotel brands), which offers room upgrades and late check-out, subject to availability. Free breakfast is reserved for Titanium status (30 nights or stays at 3 brands).
Status Match Opportunities
While the status itself is of limited value on its own, it can come in handy if other loyalty programs offer a status match. For example, the following options are currently available:
- Royal Jordanian (Oneworld Ruby) for US$49 (~€43)
- MSC Voyagers Club Silver (enter NH or Kempinski as the matching program)
- Best Western Rewards Status Match
- Radisson Rewards Status Match (not 100% guaranteed, but likely)
Frequently, loyalty programs reject matched or gifted statuses when you try to match them further. This is particularly frustrating if you have paid a fee beforehand, which is usually non-refundable. Since this GHA status was not obtained through Statusmatch.com, we consider the risk to be fairly low, though a slight risk still remains with the Royal Jordanian match.
Conclusion
GHA Gold status is admittedly not very valuable on its own, and the current status match options aren’t incredibly exciting either. However, because the status is completely free and valid for a long time, you never know what opportunities might arise between now and December 2027. Therefore, securing it as a backup is certainly a good idea.