I'm moving from Washington, DC to Honolulu in early January (yippee!).

I have not had a lot of business travel on my current job. Living in DC, and not wanting to go all the way to Dulles every time I fly, I have not been able to concentrate all my flights in any one program. So I don't have elite status anywhere, except for a temporary comp to Gold by AA. So upgrades have not been much of a motivator in choice of program. That said, I have focused on AA, and accumulated (net of redemptions) a couple of hundred thousand miles, mostly from credit card use. To date, I have preferred to use my miles for business class international travel.

In Hawaii, I anticipate that I will fly more both for business and personal reasons, so I expect that I will easily reach an elite level and upgrades will become more of a motivator. I will want to use miles for business class travel to Asia and business or first class travel to the Mainland.

Any suggestions as to where I should move my FF program loyalty?

I've always been relatively happy with AA's wide variety of partners and redemption opportunities. However, they don't fly from Honolulu to Asia (I'd be on partners JL or OZ) and their first class service to the mainland is supposed to be awful. I also have had a hard time using miles for the front cabin on exploratory trips to the Islands.

UA flies to Asia from Honolulu, and they've got a lot of capacity to the Islands. That seems to translate to a lot of award availability: I used Starponts to book an award trip in business to the Islands earlier this year and had no problem sith desired dates. But I'm never been too impressed with their redemption levels to Asia, particularly where you have to use a partner airline for all or a part of the trip.

NW flies to Asia from Honolulu. I took a recent trip to Hawaii in the front cabin on NW, and was impressed by the service. But there seem to be a lot of compliants about NW's Asia service, and a lot of unhappiness with the airlie and their FF program in general.

Any further thoughts on the advantages or disadvantages of each carrier? Any other suggestions from the experts?

Thanks -- Charlie