Picking airline for 2017
 

Have a bit of a conundrum deciding which airline to commit to this year and looking for some outside opinions.

Short story: ORD based, AA PLT for several years but status matched to UA Gold last year for two reasons: (1) to get *G for several international trips with wife (Europe, AUS, NZ, MX) and (2) get access to even more direct routes out of ORD than AA has (e.g. Vancouver, Calgary).

But now I may be moving to Asheville, NC by the end of 2017 so I have three options which are about the same amount of pros/cons. Most importantly I go from almost all direct routes to 100% connections; can't do anything about that. Expecting to reach 75K miles (last year was 60k One World and 30k Star Alliance). Regardless of home base my travel is 90% US Domestic and Canada, mostly focused on Central US. Handful of EU and APAC trips though which can equate to 30%+ of total yearly mileage.

My options as I see it:

1. Stay with AA and give up on UA as I know I won't get a status match approval again for several years. AA has several AVL-CLT dailies and I can then connect to nearly all of the US and eastern CAN locations I visit. Upside is I personally prefer AA but the latest changes are placing them no better/worse than UA/DL. Downside is I have to assume I'll rarely if ever get F upgrades (which are already dwindling as we all know). Addition of Plat Pro helps here as I'll reach that this year (if I can get One World flights on international trips).
   
2. Stay with UA. The longer I stay in Chicago the more this makes sense. Upside is that I get increased direct coverage over AA, more (potential) F upgrades. Also international travel pops up randomly and I always seem to end up on Star Alliance carriers internationally. Downside is this is worst option for AVL based flights as I'd have to connect through ORD for all flights, but at least I'd have a direct flight option back to Chicago for when that's my actual destination (small plus).
   
3. Status match to Delta in preparation for move and have more daily options out of AVL to ATL and then I can get connections to pretty much anywhere. I know little about Delta other than it appears that not only will F upgrades be little to none when flying through ATL but even the better Economy seats are not selectable at the time of booking like AA MCE and UA E+ are? That seems like a huge negative.

Just curious what others think if they'd have to do something similar. I'm completely torn between AA and UA at the moment and I need to book flights to MCI, DEN, and LHR for this month.

Thanks,

IMO much depends on whether or not you're considering moving to Asheville, or planning to move to Nashville. This may be a good time to examine the possibilities, but perhaps a bit early to choose.

I would tend towards AA mainly because of CLT. If the XXX - AVL flights are canceled on either DL or UA you will be stuck in Chicago/Atlanta overnight.

However with AA as long as you can get back to CLT you are in okay shape since you can always drive under a worst case scenario