RustyC

One drawback: Once you gain awareness of what the benefits are, you'll hear a bit from the occasional long-timer like moi about how bennies USED to be so much better. Like 50K in threshold bonuses annually with DL, award sales to BKK at 40K with them or to HKG that one time with CO at 25K RT. Throw-away ticketing was also possible at one time, and the service up front was much better.

OTOH, in the early days of generally available online booking it was a lot of work to piece together a wacky itinerary segment-by-segment using command-line interfaces (all segments had to have the sale seat, and they also had to meet the connection-time and other fare rules). You could hit a lot of dead ends. There also weren't any kiosks, and humans would react unpredictably to seeing such weird tickets that airlines maintained were against their rules. LCCs also flew far fewer routes, and some places like MSP were notorious for high fares as "fortress hubs."

So those of us who enjoyed the old level of bennies had to earn them.