I live in Istanbul, I'm not a frequent flyer, but I aim to become one.

I plan to fly:

Turkish Airlines program creates too much tax usually so reward tickets don't really make sense. Accumulating miles to get higher status is not easy either.

I have read around the internet that United Airlines program is most advantageous, especially when you're not a U.S. resident. Many others suggest Asiana Airlines because attaining higher status requires much less miles, and you get 2 years to collect those miles instead of the usual 1. A lot of people are fans of Aegean Airlines as well. Their mile requirement for higher status is low as well but they introduced the requirement of 2 Aegean flights for silver and 4 for gold in addition to the mile requirement or you need double the amount of miles. Now 2 flights on Aegean is attainable for someone living in Istanbul, quick flights to Athens in the summer seem cheap as well. Greek islands with Athens layover are a tad expansive and would be overshadowed by sea transportation.

From what I gather, *A silver status is not much use. Gold is the only one that looks useful to me. Attaining *A Gold seem most possible on Asiana (low miles needed and 2 years allowed) followed by Aegean (low miles needed but need to fly Aegean 4 times which is quite burdensome).

So first aim is attempting to gain status. Secondary is reward tickets. Turkish is not good at all with those. Asiana would probably be not much use for me in this regard. United might be useful but I heard there could be extra fees for flights originating outside USA? Not sure about rewards with Aegean. After doing 4 flights with them to get *A Gold status, you wouldn't really need any reward flights to Greece. They fly to Paris etc but doing a layover in Athens to go to Paris just seems off.

What should I do? Thanks

p.s. I signed up to ask this question, I've been reading around here for the last two days. I wanted to pick an anonymous username that was related to cities or airlines etc and this one was available after trying a few others. So now we have a funny situation with this username and looking for any program that is not in accordance with it

Update: One other thing that I've learned, and I hope not to regret sharing this with the world as so far it has been a piece of information that is locally known in Turkey but not shared in English, is that you can buy Turkish Airlines *G status in a somewhat complicated way. Turkish has 4 tiers on its program Classic, Classic Plus, Elite, Elite Plus. Both Elite and Elite Plus are *G. And if you have Elite Plus status you can buy 3 Elite giveaways for 40,000 miles. So, naturally, some people cash in on this. It was previously known to me that some people online sold Elite status for 150 to 250 dollars a few years ago. After doing the research in the original posting and posting it yesterday, I recalled this situation and look into it, whether there were people online still doing this. I found and contacted someone and was offered Elite status for the steep price of 1300$. They would probably drop that price by 300 at least but I did not enquire further and told them to have a nice life with their steep price.

Still open to advice.