Originally Posted by
indiafan
If I go to Marriott way and get their credit card, then I would earn platinum elite in their program after a year, and with rewardsplus I would get premier silver with united, I could transfer points to mileageplus at a better ratio than others enough to get a saver economy reward plus, also have points to transfer to Southwest to top up for their companion pass if needed, again at a reasonable rate than others.
If you really are going to do this (which I wouldn't advise), then it may be simpler and easier for you to just do spending on something like the CSP, where you get generic, flexible points that can be transferred to a number of partners (in the Chase case that includes both UA and WN).
But still, I don't know why you would want to do this. If you want to earn hotel points, spend money at hotels and on hotel cards. If you want to earn airline miles, spend money on airline cards. Focus on signup bonuses as they will earn you an order of magnitude more points/dollar than ordinary bonused spend. And pick the best program for where you want to go any what you want to do. For the actual work flying you mentioned, it sounds to me like you want to use WN and accrue miles in that program for your domestic use. For your trips to India, I would suggest accruing AA miles as those can be used on both EY and QR, which gives a lot of options. But I would accrue those without ever setting foot on an AA aircraft. Of course yet others will argue that you should probably be doing your domestic flying with AA rather than WN.
It all comes down to how much spend you do and how many tricks you are willing to use.