Take a look at Avianca Life Miles!

i hardly ever step foot on one of the airlines that are in the global alliance. All my points come from credit card. i am based in the uk. i transferred all of my diamond club balance over to ba avios. i've now spent all of my avios. but i guess that ba avios is the easiest for a uk credit card holder and tesco shopper to collect ?

I use Avianca's Lifemiles for cheap purchases of miles/mileage tickets that have low cancellation fees and allow for one-way tickets.

I use USAirways' Dividend Miles for relatively cheap purchases of miles to redeem for mileage tickets that I won't need to change in either direction. [The high cancel/change fees and the restrictions against changing the tickets after flying is one of the reasons why I don't invest more in the program.]

I use United's program for a plurality of my Star Alliance flight activity, mainly because I still fly UA a lot.

I use ANA's program for transferring points from other programs for select redemption purposes.

I use Scandinavian's program for intra-Scandinavia domestic flight redemptions since they provide me a very high CPM redemption value.

I keep an Aegean Star Gold account because it's so easy to earn/retain *G status with it.

Previously, I would pretty much consolidate at least a third of my Star Alliance flight activity in BD's program and sometimes even most of my Star Alliance flight activity. That era is over and now I'm diversifying across more programs than ever before as a result. In some ways, I'm better off now than ever before because of what the BD DC wrap up motivated me to do: get involved more deliberately with more programs and really up my gaming of them.

I have an upcoming flight with Brussels Airlines from MAN to COO and I currently have no foot in Star Alliance. Brussels Airlines don't have their own FF program, using Miles and More instead. Since M&M have already had a big, fat chance to earn my loyalty (hint: they blew it), what would our assembled experts recommend?

I've zero chance of earning any status for the foreseeable future so I'm looking at good earnings, no expiry and perhaps the opportunity to use accumulated miles for things other than flights.

I would cross-reference your ticket's fare booking codes with the following:

http://en.aegeanair.com/milesandbonu...iles/#BRUSSELS

3,000 miles of flight credit is enough for Star Silver with Aegean, given that the sign up bonus counts toward status too.

LifeMiles doesn't allow stopovers so not really a choice.