RE: AS joining OW

While most of my views on this were during the pre-covid era, I thought this was a fabulous strategic move, especially from my perspective. Before AS joining OW, I had to always balance between my preference for AS Mileage Plus, OWE from either AA or CX and purchase flights accordingly. For SE Asia routes which pre-pandemic was an essential route out of SFO/LAX, OWE is incredibly valuable especially when flying intra-Asia where HKG was a main hub. Now, not sure sort of operations CX or HKG will have coming out of the pandemic, but if it returns to anything near what it had been before the virus, OWE is a game changer.

Again, from my perspective, it's now much easier where I don't have to decide which plan to use and just allocate all of them to my AS FF, whether it's CX, JL or AA TCONs; not having a need to try and get OWE on the others makes life--mine anyway--much easier. Ok, with the 24 segment thing, I'm probably gonna have to fill in the gap, but, assuming we return to a somewhat normal SE Asia traveling environment, 75K for OWE will be just fine.

Having most of my routes emanate out of SFO & LAX, I had always thought AS' entry into OW was an ideal fit and a great strategic move, but it had never occurred to me that AA would allow it. I still think this was best thing AS could've done and it was absolutely necessary if they, as they claim, are serious about dominating the SF Bay area market and becoming our "hometown" airline.

While only speaking for myself, as much as I had enjoyed flying VX, they would never have been able to orchestrate entry into OW; for me, the best thing that could've happened in my flying endeavors was the day AS's C-Suite decided to buy VX--I just didn't know it then. You know, and being an eternal optimist, we're going to get through this virus crap, return to some kind of normal, and the SE Asian routes will be back. While I don't know when, China ain't goin anywhere, and we in the West Coast will always have to fly there to take part in what will be the largest market in the history of civilization.