Hi Flyertalkers,

My question is of the type "Which airline mileage programme should I choose".

My home airport would be BRU, a base for Brussels Airlines (Miles & More member). I am already a M&M member, but in the last couple of years I missed FT status (*A silver, 35K miles required) by ~10K miles.

So I was thinking, it might be worth to join another programme, realising that most North American airlines (I looked at UA an US) allow one to get *A silver equivalent status for 25K miles flown in a year.

My travel plans this year are a trip to Alaska (gives me around 15K miles in coach) and a trip to New Zealand towards the end of the year, returning in January 2011 (so around 12K miles for one way). Plus a handful of intra-European flights. This all would be in coach. The long-haul flights would be for leisure, while the intra-European flights would be for business. So far most of my flights have been on *A partners (LH, SN, NZ, UA).
This pattern will likely remain similar in the following years.

Given that I plan to take a couple of very long intercontinental flights a year, I'd like to make these as agreeable as possible. Which means I am mostly after class upgrades, lounge access, higher baggage allowance, priority boarding, etc. Is *A silver status going to bring me closer to any of these? Would it be worth to attempt some mileage runs in order to get to Gold status? And finally, should I stay with M&M, or join another programme?

Cheers,
Zamzon

Bmi I would say

Yes and no. Good program and reasonably easy to get to status. At the same time, likely to disappear in the near future and there are a number of changes going on in it right now that are not incredibly customer-friendly. Still, it is probably the best *A program in Europe right now unless one flies a LOT of paid long-haul C/F fares.

For the OP, *S will not get you extra luggage or lounge access. And there is no alliance-wide complimentary upgrade scheme. Getting *S might not really get you what you are going for.

The reason I suggest Bmi is that if Bmi programme get discontinued, it prolly is going to be swallowed by M&M, where OP already likely has some miles.

Currently there is an 'advance status' offer on bmi where you start on sliver and retain it for 12 months if you earn 4000 status miles in the first 3 months:

http://www.flybmi.com/bmi/en-gb/diam...embership.aspx

On the pattern you say you would earn 15+12+12k (as your bmi year would include your return flight from NZ in Jan 2011) which would be enough to qualify for *G with bmi on their own without taking into consideration your Europe flights, presuming all are mile-earning with bmi.

Thanks guys for suggesting bmi and the promotion above; it does look very generous, and may well be the solution to my problem . Now I only need to earn 4000 within the next 3 months, which will likely have to be through a mileage run, as my first planned trip overseas was going to be around June.