Originally Posted by CathayMVP

I have low spend so maybe that's why I don't agree with you. If you have a business, then definitely that would make sense since you can literally mint them.

However, as a MVP Gold 75k on a cheapish SFO-JFK, that's roughly 11,250 miles, that's like 7 round trips. If you spend $300 round trip, that's $1800.

If you spend on airfare on Amex plat for 5x, that same spend gets 10k amex points (rounded up), and with a 40% bonus, that's 14,000 BA points. As an BA member, you earn roughly 25% of miles on the cheapest flight. I am not going to dig through all the numbers and fare codes and nuances including status bonuses for BA. Let's just say that crediting to BA, you would get 8,750 miles (5,000 miles * 7 round trips * 25% of miles earned). After all that spend, you would be at 23k BA points if you had a 40% bonus, which is almost 1/4th of a SFO-HND flight.

There are some flights that are much better via AmEx/C1/Chase, and there's an opportunity cost to all of them of course. For OW partners and Starlux, Alaska is still pretty decent now (not awesome compared to before). I'll save my credit card points for Skyteam and Star Alliance. You should definitely choose to maximise each category and sub but to say that Alaska is completely useless and that BA and CX are "mintable" is quite a stretch unless you have major business spend.