Originally Posted by dellyb
Thankyou for your responses. I see I should have provided more information (it was too late last night when I posted). We live in the US and my daughter will be studying in Melbourne. The flight does qualify for miles from SQ. My question was how to determine which of the Star Alliance partners ff programs she should join since I am a little leery of the US airlines that have been close to bankruptcy in the past few years. If the miles are easily used among all the Star Alliance members, then I thought she might as well join SQ ff program.
As a rule of thumb it is best to join the FF program of the airline you are using most often. So even though your daughter is now flying on SQ - long term she might use a US airline more often and thus making it a better deal to join UA or US.
But the selection of a program is really hard - if you fly a lot first class LH is great, if you fly a lot in coach UA is very good. If you want to have your gold card fast you should go to BD, if you want to have award tickets for fewer miles the American airlines are better than the Asian airlines - the options are endless...