Ok, I have read up on a lot of information here! One unexpected issue is that now I am almost paralyzed with information!!

Here's my situation. I am wondering what program to make my 'base program'. I am at the point in my family and career life where traveling for pleasure is possible. I do no air travel for work, so all actual flights will be vacations. Due to the limited number of actual flights, I think it is best to concentrate on putting the miles in one program.

We will do most (if not all) of our flying out of MCO- so basically all carriers are in play. We'll commonly be going to ALB and DEN once each per year. Somewhat more infrequently, but hopefully once a year internationally to FCO (but for sure in March '11) and years we don't do that maybe somewhere in the Caribbean.

Based on where we will be traveling, we'd probably use the miles for upgrades vs. bookings- as i know it doesn't make sense to claim rewards for domestic travel. I don't imagine that we would ever hit any status level- even if we did a Den, ALB, FCO trip in one year, it would only end up being 18K miles or so.

I looked at the stickies and the thread ranking the progs, has airlines on it that don't exist anymore... So I am figuring that there has been other changes since it was posted in 03. So, the question is... for my travel plans, and of any other casual flyer, has the most bells and whistles?

Thanks!

I would suggest US to be the FF program (to deposit miles from UA flights), with SPG AMEX be the primary credit card (so you can transfer your SPG points to US with bonus miles).

read up on the aa plt challenge....perhaps y'all could get it & have the benefits for a year or two w/the soft landing....sign up your family if it looks like you have the fare that will get you the points....the trip to fco will get it for you.... good luck...

thanks clacko, hadnt seen that before. i'll look into it.

cory- was thinking i was going to get the spg card until this morning when i asked daycare if they took amex. it was a big fat no, which is a big fat bummer. one question on the us plan- can i use my points for upgrades on ua?

IMO, upgrading domestic flights provides an even lower bang for the buck than redeeming domestic awards. What's more, you might be surprised to learn how much additional cash you need to throw down in order to upgrade your flights to Europe.

Nowadays, it's frequently possible to acquire miles on the cheap (e.g. with credit card sign up bonuses and promotions in which miles cost less than 1 cpm). By taking advantage of these, you should be in a position to top off whatever program you end up going with in order to redeem some high value awards.

Unfortunately you can't use US miles for upgrades on UA flights, because US doesn't participate in the *A upgrade award program. CO is another *A partner that participates in the *A upgrade award program, and as US it doesn't have the starnet blocking, thus you have much more award flight options than UA.
Plus, there is an CO Mileathon promotion going on and you could get extra bonus miles for signup of a CO Mastercard.
http://www.continental.com/web/en-US...41527D12008738

If you would like to stick to UA, then the current UA visa promotion of 50K miles with waiver of the first year annual fee is the one that you don't want to miss. You could see more detail about this promotion in another threads at this forum and the UA forum.

If I have to travel on holidays last minute and the fare goes extremely hight, I would redeem an award ticket instead of buying a revenue ticket. Although with no EQM earned on these non-revenue tickets, I did often got travel credits or VDB vouchers, which can cut off the expense of my future EQM-earning reservations.