Thanks Nelumbo! I appreciate your thoughts.

I have no idea how much my company will be spending on my flights. I only know that it has some corporate travel arrangement. As a "pre-employee" I am not aware of the details of that arrangement, nor do I know what information regarding that arrangement it will share with me once I start working. Based on the travel requirements as I understand them so far, I assume my air travel costs will be around / at least $30K/yr. From what I can gather, the company seems pretty flexible in that as long I as am willing to travel a lot, the company seems willing make my life as pleasant as possible, even if that costs it some $. But of course I will not know that for sure until I actually start working there, which will not be until May.

CO is my favorite U.S.-based airline as far as my personal experience with airline service is concerned. So I like the idea of sticking with CO as much as possible. AA concerns me because its only flights from the closest airport are via ORD, which I detest.

Today I have done some more research into airline flight schedules and my own travel needs. From that it looks like UA may be the best match. It offers good nonstop schedules from IAD to many of the places I think I will be travelling to the most, and IAD is not THAT terrible of a drive. Plus IAD would be a primary connection point to my closest airport, and IAD does not seem as horrid as ORD / EWR / PHL for connections. Also, with *A, I could connect via CLT on LCC, or CLE (or even [shudder] EWR) on CO to the closest airport as alternates.

Just wondering what my secondary 100K airline would be. Based on your post, CO might be a good choice, but does it make sense to have a second *A carrier in lieu of a carrier in another alliance?