I have status on Both United and Continental. If I separate my travel in 2011 with both airlines will the mileage I earned be merged at the end of the year to determine my Status level on the finally merged airline???

http://www.continental.com/web/en-US...romoCode=A6108

That's what the link says. However - if you do 50K on each airline, for example, not entirely clear if the 100K will get you any SWUs for 2012 (I'm guessing no). Nor will you get the 2 RUs starting at 75K. So, still probably better to consolidate crediting to one program only.

Thats what I plan on doing. Not sure how the lifetime EQM's thing will work, but CO does that by counting all EQM's including *A partners versus UA just counts UA eqms. Something I wish I would have found out about before yesterday.

As for me, I think I'll be crediting towards CO next year because of that, and this past year, out of my 570k miles on *A, only about 124k were on UA metal, so I'm down 446k towards lifetime status versus if I had credited towards CO.

CO also credits SQ, OZ, and TG at 150% eqm for C class travel versus 100% for UA.

As my travel is getting cut significantly due to a promotion as people have to travel to me instead of vice versa and work is using other carriers of the *A alot more often now than UA thanks to *A corporate plus, I think it will make more sense for me to credit to CO.

Ouch.

Credit to one program (as long as you're at least gold on CO). You'll get your SWU/CR1 credit either way since they'll combine the counts.

The biggest open question is what happens for lifetime status, and since it is probably a low-priority item for the program, likely it hasn't been decided yet (Per CO insider certainly nothing to announce yet). Credit to CO for now I'd say, unless you're mostly on UA metal. Personally, CO's lifetime EQM is more "fair" in that you utilize the program as its intended, and its better earning-wise, but UA's offers a far more useful status @ 1MM BIS.