Originally Posted by
dkatvt
Hi all, Thanks for any help in advance.
I travel infrequently enough that I'll never earn status on an airline and luckily that's unimportant to me. What I'd like to know is, is there any one program I can use to aggregate miles from such variable travel?
I recently looked into AS since it appears that I can attribute both DL and AA miles to the same program (maybe US later?) and also transfer SPG points there as well. Is this a reasonable strategy? I doubt I'll ever travel AA or DL enough to book awards based on miles flown alone. But if that trickle of miles could be consolidated somewhere, it may make a difference. I also occasionally rent a car (2x a year) so if those rewards could go to a FFP, that may help.
My question for you fine folks is, what is my best strategy for aggregation?
Hi Dkatvt,
AS isn't a bad choice. But with their escalating fight with DL, personally I think they won't be keeping that partnership too long. But who knows I guess. One thing to consider with them though is that booking int'l awards, which you list as a priority, they do not allow multiple partners on a single ticket. I'm new to AS myself, having mostly been doing UA and AA a little, so I don't know if I'm explaining that right. But you should read a little in the Alaska forum, and consider that from a smaller airport, you might have to position to DC to make use of an award on a partner, or to NYC/ORD for Cathay awards, etc.
I think UA is pretty good for award availability, and the Chase cards all you to keep building up and you can supplement your 10-20k a year.
If you credit straight to AA, their miles are pretty easy to earn right now with cards, so you could also easily earn many miles on AA and your flying just supplement the CC earn.
I'd stick with UA and Chase, unless you want to start doing CCs.