Actually, in Dallas. Which brings up the Wright Amendment. If you buy tickets (plural intentional) to fly one person on Southwest between Dallas and LAX, you earn HALF of a free flight right there, because you have to buy separate tickets to a Wright Amendment state (another airport in Texas, or Albuquerque) and then a separate ticket from there to LAX (and you get 4 credits for each if you purhcase at www.swa.com). But you obviously also have to pay twice (tho one of them can be a cheap hopscotch to Houston).

But the original poster also mentioned that these far-flung flights would be rare (the first few weeks being the exception), and short hop flights within the region would be common. That's where Southwest shines.

So for this poster, I disagree with BigLar's contention that it should all be focused on one airline. Yes, it shouldn't be spread around too sparsely, but in the case of someone in the Dallas area, because Southwest has such great/frequent service within the region from there, if someone's going to be doing that a lot each year, then Southwest Rapid Rewards makes total sense for that. But then, if some trips will take the same person further away, American makes total sense for that. Since this person will be flying twice a week, they can afford to fly Southwest when it's much more convenient and American when that is either more convenient (or equally convenient and they want to get some miles into that account).

If this traveler can fly twice a week on Southwest, then she'll earn more flight awards on Southwest than they can both probably use , so it would seem to make sense to channel all hotel and car rental activity then into AA (as well as those flights where it's pracitcal to use AA instead of Southwest).