elitetraveler

I think that's what I said -- The ones I am familiar with are all quite poor when compared with the good times of 10 to 20 years ago. Nothing worth jumping to.

BAEC Gold for an AA flier in North America provides free Admirals Club and Flagship Lounges, Silver provides free AC - so about a $500 annual value. For anyone who is flying paid F/J in N America on AA and doesn't care about upgrades, that's a good value, particularly for Flagship lounges since you can't buy access.

I think pretty much everyone and anyone would also say that UA and AA have followed through in gutting their programs, although maybe not as far as DL. I gave a look at going back to AA as my accumulator, not for status, as I have LT Plat, but just accumulation. I will keep putting my OW miles into BAEC simply because I have a BAEC credit card and 500,000 + miles sitting there.

I can't speak for others, but one reason it's still sitting there is each time I look to use them, the redemption doesn't make sense because of the fees so I buy a ticket on another carrier in premium class, or it's not available and I just buy a premium class ticket on another carrier, or I redeem from my stash of LH or AX miles.

I never really looked at CX and QR, except I read QR's redemption center is not very good.

For your point, however, if one is invested in BAEC - either moving towards Lifetime Gold (a very attractive perk if it stays as is for OW lounge benefits) or you have a stack of miles in BAEC, I can see why without anything clearly better out there, one would stay with BAEC as their accumulator, particularly as there wouldn't be a strong reason to switch unless you were domestic AA needing comp upgrades. Again, it's not a vote saying BAEC is great - just that there is not another compelling proposition that makes one want to take a step back to go forward.