Originally Posted by
samnc0
I am assuming most of you only have ONE carrier you primarily use, right? In other words, it isnt worth it to get a FF card to cover United, American, and US Airways...or is it?
For what it is worth, my current plan is to keep United, use my HH points for some hotels since I need hotels anyway. The SPG card was intended to be dumped in a 1:2 ratio to the United account, but perhaps the best usage out of the SPG card is to keep it to get a few hotel stays.
As to the first question, NO. I would say a plurality of FTers probably have one program that they credit as much as possible of their
paid flights to, mostly so they can get status. But when it comes to collecting miles for reward flights, I say collect them all! Well, not really
all, but any program in which you can cheaply gather enough miles for a good redemption is worth paying attention to. You never really know which program will have award availability to the destination you want when you want it, although some programs are better for certain spots. If you, for example, have only United miles and want to fly to Buenos Aires, it may be difficult to find an award ticket on *A, but if you also have some AA miles, chances are you'll be in luck, as both AA and their oneworld partner LAN usually have good availability to South America.
As for the SPG card, it would be an extraordinarily poor use of Starpoints to redeem them at 1:2 for United miles. You can easily get 3 cents or more per point when redeeming for *wood hotels, and at least 2 cents per point exchanging for virtually any non-UA airline partner. Putting them into UA, you probably get a penny a point -- not worth doing unless you're like 1k miles short of a good redemption you want to do on UA.