Since we live in Australia, the logical thing would be to use QF to accrue and redeem miles. But I was having a look at AA and their program is more generous--unless I am missing something. We take one trip per year in economy. Usually we go Star Alliance and accrue to UA's program which has nice awards to the South Pacific. We are unlikely to ever become elite and upgrades aren't really an issue.

Next year, we are doing the following itinerary offered by TN which obviously fits the OW partnership:

BNE-QF-SYD-TN-PPT-LA-IPC-LA-SCL-LA-GRU/-GIG-LA-SCL-LA-SYD-QF-BNE

We will also have a side trip SCL-LIM-Puerto Maldonado-CUZ-LIM-SCL all on Lan Peru.

This should net us just a tad over 20,000 miles. If we use QF, we can't get much for that. If we use AA, according to the award charts, we should get a domestic QF award anywhere QF flies (unlike QF awards which are mileage based) which we would use to visit PER or possibly Darwin/Northern Territory.

It just seems really silly we have to use a non-Australian program to get a decent award flight. Am I missing something here? Is there some other reason I don't know about why I should use QF instead of AA such as bonus miles? We don't normally use OW airlines as most of our trips are to the Middle East or Asia and we fly EK and SQ or TG a lot.