Originally Posted by
WestSideBilly
The obvious answer is to, yes, abandon AS for AA and be a hub captive. It should be relatively painless since you'd be starting with EXP.
The more in depth answer is really a question: where do you fly? The price difference is an issue, but you also need to look at schedule and frequency as well. If you're doing PHX-SFO 30 times a year, sticking with AS and their 1x daily on an E175 would be vastly inferior to AA's 3x mainline dailies. If you miss a flight, what are your alternatives to getting home? Waiting a few hours for the next direct, or taking a multi stop route and losing 10 hours, or having to wait until the next day?
I think AA wins both on price and network, and it's not close.
I mostly like AS as a place to credit international partner flights to. The miles are worth more than AA IMO and you generally get more of them. So I'd like to keep AS status so I can get the elite bonuses and also have OWE benefits when flying those partner flights with my AS number attached. Without the AS elite bonus I may as well just credit everything to AA and get the 120% elite bonus there.
I totally get that the segment requirements are there to prevent people from using AS as a mileage wallet. I've never done that before (when I was in SF the bulk of my domestic flying was on AS) but that's really what I want to do now. I'm trying to find a way to make it work but it's not looking good.