Hmmmm... didn't mean to provoke flag-waving for your favorite airline :-) I have no desire to push airlines here like a favorite football team. As a consumer I demand good service and patronize those that provide it and only as long as they keep providing it.

On occasion, I have written to the respective airlines about problems that I have faced with both CO and UA. If they don't hear of the problems how will they improve? I was a regular on UA in the 80s but as they became awful in the early-mid 90s, simply dropped them like I did with AA now. It is only this year that I gave them a serious try.

Yes, I am PO'd at AA. The bumping was just the last straw in a string of bad service problems over 9000 miles of trips not an isolated incidence. As a frequent flier I am not naive about being bumped but to phrase it as a security issue is dishonest. I have written a lengthy letter calmly documenting the problems I faced to AA. I will post that here after (and if) I get a reply from them. I canceled my FF card because of the bad service in general not because of the bumping.

The upgrades may very well be better on AA than UA both of which provide certificates based on miles flown although the unlimited domestic complementary upgrades on CO is hard to beat. As I mentioned I never got a chance to try the upgrades on AA. The service on AA, I am sorry to say in my experience, was just consistently bad on AA and this is based on flying over 140k actual miles this year alone on various carriers.

CO has some flights to South America but they are not as convenient as AA in connections and routes and costs. This is what made me try out AA in the first place recently and I used AA for Europe as well.

Cheers