Originally Posted by
craigthemif
Status matches are all well and good, but you'll quickly find that *A and ST top tier elite statuses are noticably worse than OWE.
So unless you are relocating to somewhere where Oneworld really isn't much of an option, you'd just be collecting shiny cards to use on a couple of flights per year at most.
I agree, status is only really valuable if you use an airline a lot. One also needs to consider the downside of spreading your miles amongst too many airlines. You get the most benefit from accumulating a lot of miles in only one or two schemes, so you can use them for something that would otherwise be expensive if you used cash. Generally this would mean long haul in J or F class.