Originally Posted by macfadsj

In addition to thinking about how you would earn the miles, it might be prudent to investigate availability of award seats on TATL flights that are acceptable to you. As you know, UA's availability is generally pretty good.

Alaska has a long list of partners and the personnel at their Partner desk are drop dead fabulous. However, if you go to their website and search availability for a couple of hypothetical trips, you may find that most of the available seats are now on British with those horrible fuel surcharges, or on Delta which require an exorbitant number of miles.

So, the value for TATL flights lies in KLM and Air France. The Alaska website displays availability for SFO-CDG and AMS, but is less than perfect for destinations beyond those two gateways. It may help to break up your search into segments ( SFO-AMS, and then AMS-Oslo for instance) and if you find the seats are there, you may have to call the partner desk rather than book it online, which will incur a $25 fee.

And if your plans ever call for a trip to the Pacific, or South America, then the Alaska program has very attractive award levels and good seat availability on Cathay Pacific, and Lan, respectively. Qantas is a good option to Australia, but if you want to fly J you need to book well in advance and if in F, then time it to the exact day about 11 months in advance that the new seats are loaded into the system