<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by benjoey:
To level their frequent flyer programs, I'm afraid that the three airlines are going to increase the mileage requirements to the highest amount needed for a destination. For instance, it's 35K to go from North America to Rio on Continental. It's 50K for Delta.</font>
I sure hope not. In the past this has not been done. For example, when US-AA had the alliance, you could even pool miles between the programs. A flight from US-Carribbean was 30k on AA, 35k on US. If you booked it with AA miles only you still paid 30k instead of 35k. If you pooled miles, you had to pay the higher 35k. Of course, 5k is not a big deal compared to CO's 35k to South America against DL's 50k. I guess we have yet to hear what kind of program agreement this will be. So far, the AA-US is the only one I can recall that permitted mileage pooling, the rest of the just awarded the miles to whatever program you wanted and the award levels were not necessarily made to agree.