Originally Posted by
brunos
I might misunderstand your post, but I don't see what benefit you currently derive from FB.
As you have noticed, you need a huge amount of miles to get a F award. As you don't fly much, you have been hit by successive devaluations of the FB program.
You seem to mostly fly domestic and FB is of little use. If you were on DL SM you might get upgrades. And spreading your limited travel into two skyteam programs seems a bit strange.
I have a bunch of AMEX miles and unless I am mistaken, if I were to hold DL status I could not redeem for Air France F which I have redeemed in the past (via AMEX points transferred to FlyingBlue) and have always enjoyed the experience. My wife is Swiss and living the USA she rarely gets the chance to speak in other languages, so she enjoys speaking in French when flying Air France, generally the crews recognize almost immediately that her accent is Swiss, how they can tell is beyond me, but they can.
Also, as I only fly F when flying DELTA (I am willing to fly Economy on other airlines), upgrades are of little benefit to me and the entire SkyMiles scheme just never appealed to me personally.
I do not know a lot when it comes to Frequent Flier miles, but I know this much FlyingBlue works best for me because if I want to fly Air France F, I have to maintain some level of status to be able to redeem for F.
One of my best friends in Medical School is Taiwanese and my wife and I try and head to Taiwan every 4 years to visit with him and his wife, generally my wife earns enough miles from business travel that in four years we have 300,000 China Airlines miles for two business class tickets to Taiwan, so that is why I have this dual frequent flier mile system.
It maybe terribly inefficient and wrong (it probably is) but it how I have done things for a while. I more than happy to hear about a better way forward, I openly admit that I probably doing things wrong.