Originally Posted by
sbm12
Even with the new award charts in play they are still better than CO or UA on many awards. You get hit with a phone booking fee and they may not be the most stable carrier, but the miles are still a better value in many cases.
Yup. As critical as I am / was of US, booking rewards with them was always the best part of that program.
Amassing hundreds of thousands of miles was rather

but that's off-topic.
For me, CO provides the right balance between not very painful earnings and not very painful redemptions. Unless you do something

and throw EK into the mix on an award ticket.