To quote:
"Points balances and status levels will be honored in the Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan." [1]

Now, as to why I see this as a devaluation? Points about fuel surcharges notwithstanding [2], the fact is that at the moment I can book NYC-LHR or BOS-LHR with reasonable availability in UC for 25k/40k (ow/rt) points. IAD-LHR is spottier, but between those three when I last checked (late last week) I could book an outbound TATL award on 14 of the first 18 days in May and a return on 18 of the first 19 days.[3]

With Alaska the equivalent awards run 50-62.5k/100-140k [4][5]. As such, unless/until further notice I'm having to operate under the presumption that existing VX balances will transfer at 1:1 ("will be honored" has led to this presumption) and that there is no way that under the new program, even if VS is retained as a partner, the award will stay at 25/40. Ergo my presumption (and I do believe it is a safe one) is that we'll end up with AS's award prices with VX's earning structure...which is a massive difference from what I signed up for. [6] It also represents about a 50-70% hit to the effective earning power (albeit partly offset by the slight improvements to status bonuses recently announced...which probably makes it more like 45-65% as a Gold member).

[1] Source: https://blog.alaskaair.com/alaska-ai...mer-questions/
[2] And from what I can tell, some of AS' partners on this front aren't a lot better.
[3] To be fair, it is possible that some of these awards wouldn't sell to VX customers, but such availability has been legendarily generous.
[4] Source: https://www.alaskaair.com/content/mi...rd-charts.aspx
[5] I'm notably ignoring Delta due to the effective lack of a one-way award (and a presumption that I wouldn't be able to say "I want to go to/from London but I don't care where I'm leaving from the US" and still claim a round-trip award), since 125k o/w in BC is a Bad Deal. Still, 125k vs 40k is a non-trivial difference.
[6] I'm also cognizant of the fact that VX probably got an unusually good deal at startup, probably due to a combo of Branson wanting VX to succeed and the weak economy (and with it the weak premium cabin market) at the time.

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As to the "where I want to go", longer-term what I'd like is:
(1) Reasonable short-to-mid term availability on TATL flights (there's a raft of options here, obviously); and
(2) Workable longish-term availability to Asia/Australia (I'm not expecting a raft of availability two weeks out but I'd rather not be strictly locked to booking at 330 days out since that totally fuzzes even trying a round-trip).

IMHO SQ and VS are not-entirely-unreasonable choices (SQ has the advantage of "sleeping around" with most major hotel programs). At the moment, DL is not unreasonable...but (1) achieving useful status there is likely to be tricky and (2) in-program earning is far weaker than out-of-program earning (e.g. I'm likely to get far more miles for an AS flight NYC-SEA than I am for a DL flight NYC-SEA even if I credit all of the miles to DL...and, sadistically, vice-versa...). Trying to figure out other carriers seems like it may take a brute-force attack.

Basically...I'm looking at probably effectively needing to deal with two airlines (depending on patterns of transcon service in the US...DL's premium service is basically only available on a thin selection of transcon flights and then often only in exchange for one's first-born child) with a borderline farcical pattern of crediting miles (SQ takes B6, DL/AS interchange, VS/DL interchange, VX presently credits to SQ and VS). Part of the problem does seem to basically be that VX, AS, and B9 are all "out-of-network" and there's very little sharing between the three on foreign carriers.

Edit: Another note: A lot of the reason I went for VS Gold as opposed to DL (insert-level-here) was that I could basically "backdoor" the status cheaply (I think the whole status run cost me $1100 even if it was at the price of passing through ATL four times in four days [three of which were within 24 hours of one another!]). No partner bonuses beyond DL (which has a spider-web of them), however.