One of the prime benefits is the pleasure of doing battle with the IAD RCC Matrons for your drink chits. Very entertaining! Just kidding.

Seriously though, as a result of status obtained in the past year flying mostly for business plus one quick mileage run, my wife has been able to travel with me to Australia on an award ticket, to London, Stockholm, and Amsterdam in business class on an award ticket, and to New Orleans in first class on an award ticket no notice for a funeral. We now have 360K miles in the bank which will buy us several international tickets in business or first, numerous nights of awarded hotels and rental cars at top properties from Marriott and Hyatt, etc. To do this, I flew about 125K miles this year plus 25 car rentals plus about 50 nights of hotel rooms. I would have had to fly most of this anyways for work, but where time allowed, I added extra segments like IAD-LAX-SFO instead of just IAD-SFO. I now fly in business or first most of the time and have received substantial value since those international business and first tickets are very expensive. When there is only one seat left and the weather is closing in, I almost always am the one to get it. These are some of the benefits, not to mention just the amount of the world you get to see. Traveling is much more comfortable. I will do it all over again in 2008 and generate about another 360K miles we can use to travel the world in comfort. I use a simple strategy. I just do what I need to in order to fly 10K miles per month. That is two coast to coast flights. If I can take an international flight, then I might only need one flight that month to hit my goal. This puts me over 100K miles in October, leaving plenty of time in case I come up short or get off pace for some reason (i.e. corporate travel freeze to make Q4 numbers). If you can fly transpac flights, you could do 100K miles in as few as 5 round trips from the East coast. Wait for fare sales, watch for fare mistakes, and you can do it pretty easily.