My wife and I will be moving to Seattle in the next few months. However, she will need to fly back to Oakland once or twice a month. We're trying to debate whether to use southwest vs Alaska. To be honest, she would prefer to fly on Alaska since she likes assigned seating. However, 15 to 20 round trip flights to oak would only give her around 33,000 miles and MVP status. On WN, she would have no status but three free roundtrip tickets. Are there other benefits by flying Alaska? The thing we really wanted was the ability to go through the elite security line, but she would need to be MVP gold. Unfortunately, we tend to fly international and on united for our other travels. Thanks for any input or opinion - biased or not.