Hi all,

I'm new here. Looks like a great place. I know the "which program" question has been asked a million times and a million ways. Hopefully a few of you will humor me.

I'm young...early 20's. Of course, I've been a leisure traveler my whole life but always loved flying. I just moved to San Francisco for a job where I'll be doing a fair bit of business traveling. We have a limited amount of leeway in our ticketing, as flights are expensed to often budget-conscious clients. As such, we tend to fly discounted coach (and occasionally deep-discount), but have a good deal of say in which airlines we fly. I'll likely be traveling 1-3 times per month, domestic.

1-3 times per month is not much compared to many of the people I've seen around here, but enough to earn elite on a given airline I think, provided I mostly stick with them.

Pretty much all of my flying will be ex-SFO (or ex-OAK when absolutely necessary). So of course it makes sense to go with a program that has a lot of flights out of here (though they all seem to). My top destinations for personal travel are RDU (family), DCA/IAD (friends), and occasionally PHL or JFK but not enough to warrant serious consideration as a factor in choosing a program.

As for airlines, I've flown all the domestic carriers. I hate hate hate US Air, I'm not a huge United or AirTran fan but I'm willing to be persuaded. I'm ambivalent about NWA, JetBlue, and Southwest. I like American, which I've mostly flown. I also like Delta and Continental (I know CO has its issues. But I recently had an extremely pleasant flight on 12/28 from RDU-SFO, possibly due to H-class and having my pick of seats...cloth bulkhead, and breakfast in coach was a very nice touch). I also like Virgin a lot but couldn't fly them enough.

I'm currently in the AA camp. I have an AA Citi Plat card, which I use for both personal and biz-expenses. I've currently got 45K miles in the AA bank. However, I'm a little concerned about whether I'll get any real benefits from AA elite status. I can make Gold I'm sure no problem. But I know I'll never make Plat unless I challenge, and once that expires I'm back in the same spot.

My primary concern is comfort. As much as I like flying, we all know doing a lot of it in coach can be taxing. As such, I want a program where I can reasonably look forward to upgrades a) Being available, b) Clearing, and c) Not costing an arm and a leg.

From what I understand, AA Gold can only upgrade full Y, which I'll pretty much never fly. Other perks to AA Gold are the same as other airlines (priority check in, etc etc).

Now I'm sure some (if not many) will say, "Well, you're only gold. You shouldn't expect priviledges like Plats and EXP's get." Fair enough. But if I have a shot at getting them on another program I'm going to seriously consider that.

DL seems to have a really nice system. I've heard some problems with CO upgrades.

Did I answer my own question? Can anyone give me a little advice?

Thanks!