RustyC

Well, with the forced demise of distance-based miles and all the devaluations AND partial credit for partner miles, the golden age of the programs is clearly over. I don't even think we're in the silver or bronze age. Only biz travelers on high-fare tickets get the best bennies now, and their companies hate to shell out the money and are always trying to come up with blunt-instrument policies to try to spend less.

I've been self-funded for about 98% of my travels for 27 years now (100% since 1996). It used to be I could do very well with hub-attack fares from CO or NW against DL in ATL. Back in 1993 I took a series of NYC trips on CO on a triple-mileage deal with routings via IAH sometimes (ATL-IAH-EWR) to boost the miles, all booked on easySABRE greenscreens with command lines. I remember I had no way to get to Florida and earn CO miles then because they didn't publish any fares from ATL to there.

So loyalty could limit your destination options, especially in days when there were 6 or 7 legacies. My fave would be a $300 or so hub-attack ATL-HNL RT, which came around maybe 1-2 times a year. Dead-of-winter Europe could drop to low $300s as well.

It's liberating in some ways to not be locked in and having to top 50K or 75K base. OTOH, these days I actually AM a bit loyal to Frontier over Spirit because Frontier is not quite as bad, and they have distance-based miles plus an elite program that makes the inflight experience a little more bearable. There's only one tier, though, and it only takes 20K base miles to reach it.