Originally Posted by
Dr Jabadski
Please forgive me if you’re aware of this but I don’t think any airline flies LGA-LAX nonstop. I have flown LGA-LAX (with a stop) occasionally, to increase miles or increase chances of an upgrade or for a lower airfare, but if I had to do it every week I’d certainly drive the extra 20-30 minutes to JFK (from which several airlines fly nonstop to LAX). The stop increases total travel time by at least 1-1.5 hours and doubles the chances of a delay. Once in a while that’s all worth it, every week is another story.
Exactly. I take it this will be a flight for work? Assuming you don't want to connect every time, I recommend going with JFK rather than EWR as your new airport, because JFK has 5 non-stop options to LAX: AA, UA, DL, VX and B6. All these options will be useful for you at times, especially if something goes wrong (EWR only has AA and UA flying to LAX).
The legacy airlines (AA/UA/DL) should be the way to go as far as perks, etc.
Especially if price does not matter, I'd recommend going with a frequent flyer program that gives you systemwide upgrades (SWUs) if you fly 100,000+ miles per year (and you will... you should break 250,000 miles per calendar year on your schedule). I think that means AA or UA would be ideal (I believe one or both give you incremental SWUs the more you fly; someone else, please clarify this). DL's SWUs are hard to use.
As for upgrade percentage, I'm not sure which of DL, AA or UA is best. Perhaps others can chime in. As for quality of the product, both in Y and up front, I'm also not sure about the differences/intricacies. Hopefully, others can chime in on this, too.
It might be worthwhile, by the way, to
choose 2 programs and hit the highest tier with each of them. That said, you may not enjoy the process of hitting that highest tier, especially on AA (you only get unlimited upgrades at their highest tier, Executive Platinum, which takes 100,000 miles to hit (granted, the JFK-LAX upgrade is generally tough at lower tiers on other airlines anyway)).
All that said, I'm not entirely sure what's most important to you. If you can tell us, that would be great. Things that might be important to you are flight frequency, flights at specific times, upgrade %, quality of product, frequent flyer perks (like SWUs), mile accumulation (i.e. best/highest RDM bonuses for elites), ease of award redemption, etc. Let us know.
(Also, I can certainly tell you which program(s) I'd choose, if I were you, and why... but my preferences/priorities may differ from yours.)