That's definitely true, but it all depends on who has flights out of where you usually fly from. We live in NY and both my fiance and I have a ton of Delta miles. However, when we wanted to fly on miles to Vail last year, we could only do it on Delta with TWO CONNECTIONS (so NOT a WORTH IT!). We wound up depleting my NW account to get a direct flight on Continental, an option not even available to us through Delta. As a result of this, we are probably going to start earning miles on CO or NW next year, since they seem to have much better availability on each other, as well as reciprocity in terms of elite status.

There have been some indications that this is going to change fairly soon, but nobody at any of the airlines has given me a good answer as to when it might happen when I've inquired. We are still hoping to use Delta miles to fly nonstop to Hawaii for our honeymoon, and there does seem to be some availability, although not for peak travel times.