Ok, I have read up on a lot of information here! One unexpected issue is that now I am almost paralyzed with information!!

Here's my situation. I am wondering what program to make my 'base program'. I am at the point in my family and career life where traveling for pleasure is possible. I do no air travel for work, so all actual flights will be vacations. Due to the limited number of actual flights, I think it is best to concentrate on putting the miles in one program.

We will do most (if not all) of our flying out of MCO- so basically all carriers are in play. We'll commonly be going to ALB and DEN once each per year. Somewhat more infrequently, but hopefully once a year internationally to FCO (but for sure in March '11) and years we don't do that maybe somewhere in the Caribbean.

Based on where we will be traveling, we'd probably use the miles for upgrades vs. bookings- as i know it doesn't make sense to claim rewards for domestic travel. I don't imagine that we would ever hit any status level- even if we did a Den, ALB, FCO trip in one year, it would only end up being 18K miles or so.

I looked at the stickies and the thread ranking the progs, has airlines on it that don't exist anymore... So I am figuring that there has been other changes since it was posted in 03. So, the question is... for my travel plans, and of any other casual flyer, has the most bells and whistles?

Thanks!