To the people who bang on about consistency being such a strength of OW:

Have you flown MA recently??

Are you pleased with the pay-for-water service concept offered in IB Y? How about the 4-hour 'business class' flights in standard economy seats on IB and BA (no, this is not how all European airlines do it- some actually collapse the middle seat and share the space between the other two)?

Had you flown CX "regional" business class when their "region" used to include Australia? Do you think the so-called lieflat CX C product in its first generation (which AFAIK is still flying pretty long sectors e.g. AMS) is a "great travel option", especially when getting access to an arrivals facility is a lottery?

I hear people banging on about CX lounges. I've not been to a lot, but do they really have such great lounges outside HKG?

This post is not meant to say that oneworld is so bad and that the other alliances are so much better. All of them are all over the place and the simple fact is that membership in any of the three alliances should never be interpreted as a guarantee of good service.

Personally, I feel that one alliance being better than another is all a matter of geographical coverage and market positioning, and therefore strictly individual.

For example, 80% of my travel is within Europe. It would be incredibly foolish to pay for business class for those flights, so I would never make any BA status, and it's always more convenient to connect in the middle as opposed to backtracking and/or suffering a transcon before/after a very short flight, which strikes out flying with 3 out of 4 European ow members. That would leave me with Malev, which is a mediocre airline that's based in a grim airport and only seems to fly to 4 destinations outside of Albania and Moldova.

OTOH, the Skyteam airlines offer fantastic coverage of Europe, with loads of sensible connections, and that's why I mostly fly with them (*A also have good coverage, but I hate FRA and I seem to be very unlucky whenever I fly LX, so I only use them occasionally).

Similarly, it would take a complete idiot to choose ST over OW if they mostly flew around South America.