Originally Posted by
Halo117
just making sure you are aware that u could have banked AA miles and flown TN...also earn aa miles while flying a paid ticket as well. I did this and while UA/*A can't take you everywhere i fill in the gaps with other programs.
the real question this thread should focus on is potentially 5 carriers from the US serving PPT (UA, TN, AF, HA & an LCC)...is there money to be made?
Sure you can, but why dilute the mileage accrual among multiple programs, especially if the trip is leisure? If I take 3 paid J/C in a year to Asia, Europe or South America from US West, that could easily be about 60,000 earned in MP if I keep that all in Star Alliance. Depending on status and CC, that can be 2 round trip tickets for travel within the US. Those are only flown miles and does not even include the CC miles I get via MP CC. Now if one of those destinations is not where Star Alliance can reasonably get me there and I have to use another alliance carrier, now I have 40,000 on MP and 10,000 on AA (All estimates). Now MP will barely get me one domestic ticket and the miles at AA is useless until I accumulate more.
I've had points and miles with Southwest, Hawaiian and Alaska from the one off flights when UA couldn't get me to where I needed to go. All of those miles have expired and are now gone. The world is big and there are still plenty of places I want to visit, so until the day I've run out of places that Star Alliance can take me, I can move places around on my list forward or back based on which airline flies there. Also, as someone who has cashed out my miles for three J class ticket for Christmas week, YES mileage matters.