Originally Posted by gemac
To the OP: Your plan sounds good to me. The main advantage I see to AAdvantage (and the reason I use them) is award ticket availability, which I think is much better than other U.S. legacy carriers. Since you won't be using miles for award tickets much, you are probably better off with other carriers as indicated.
Thanks for the vote of confidence!
I rarely use award tickets for myself - in the past few years that I've been "playing the mileage earning game" - I've earned about 800K in all programs & have only cashed out about 155K for myself (120K on int'l travel & 35K to stage a MR/Vacation out of SEA) - the other ~250K that I have cashed out have been for family members & gifts for friends - I only really want to use my miles for personal premium cabin int'l travel & hooking up my friends who can't necessarily afford the airfare to come on vacation with me. The only time I've ever paid the premium prices for awards was for the trip to SEA where I did one way in Y & the other way in F & that was only 35K & I got upgraded on the outbound as NW Gold.