If you have the potential of a lot more flying this year, you might well end up significantly above 125K MQMs and still make a decent rollover to next year.

But I would agree that flying AA/UA or their partners would be a better plan than flying a Skyteam airline and crediting the miles to a different program. You might as well see if the grass is greener on the other side, and you're more likely in the future to have flights that you *want* to credit to AA/UA (i.e., any flights that you happen to be taking on oneworld or Star airlines) than you are to have flights that you would want to credit to some other Skyteam partner. So most likely miles credited to FlyingBlue or the like would just end up orphaned.

(There are a handful of interesting redemption opportunities on other Delta partner FFPs, like FlyingBlue's greater availability of awards on AF/KL flights, and Korean's much greater availability of awards on Korean metal including access to first class. But as you point out that requires some extra work to keep track of and take advantage of.)


AA offers the option to sign up for a challenge to parlay your China trip into mid-level status through all of next year at this point, though the challenges do come with a fee so up to you if you think you're likely to fly AA & oneworld enough thereafter for the fee to be worth it. There's a thread on the AA forum with many more details about the challenge.

AA also gives 200% EQMs on paid business class fares on AA codes (rather than the 150% Delta gives on most business class fares), so a couple of longhaul business class trips can quickly rack up a decent amount of AA status.