The big advantage to AS is that you can earn/redeem miles on AA, DL, NW and CO. Nobody else has that many domestic partners. You can also redeem on Qantas if Australia is your goal.

The downside to AS is if you never fly AS, you will get very minimal elite benefits if you make elite. But if you don't think you'll be making elite any time soon, who cares?

The other downside is that on Alaska you must fly your entire trip on the same airline. On American you may fly on combinations of partners. For example, last year I needed to get to the Big Island of Hawaii on a certain date and return on a certain date. American could do that by flying 3 segments on Hawaiian Airlines and 1 segment on on American. (Hawaiian was far superior, by the way. Free food!) Alaska had access to both airlines, but could not find an entire round trip on either one of them, and so could not accommodate me.

Also, Alaska will not allow stopovers, at least not on American, unless the stopover is necessary to complete the trip. On a trip to Belize this year, Alaska did give me a ticket to Belize with a stopover in Miami, but only because that trip could not be completed in one day on American flights. The trip could be completed in one day on Continental, but Continental award tickets were not available, as usual.

I would stay with NW. The only benefit to AS is that you'll get to fly AA and earn miles. How many times are AA that much cheaper than NW, CO, DL or AS? I'm a CO member and I haven't had to fly anyone other than those 4 all year. Plus with NW, you get great international awards, automatic upgrades on both NW and CO. NW also has great offers from time to time to earn extra miles.

Just to be clear, you're saying that AS is more restrictive in letting you redeem miles, right? You're not saying that AS is more restrictive in letting you earn miles, are you?

Either way, this is new info to me, and definitely interesting.

thanks!

Correct in one sense: You have to stay with one airline for your entire trip. But in another sense, they do have quite a few airlines from which to choose, and it appears that it will get much better. They say that soon we will be able to use Alaska miles to get tickets on Air France and KLM. That business class Air France ticket non-stop from San Francisco to Paris is really nice, and from there you can go to most anywhere in Europe. I believe that
so far that ticket is available only via Delta miles from U.S. Airlines miles programs.

I have found that availability on Alaska partners with Alaska miles is quite good. Usually they can get me to where I want to go.

I collect most of my miles on both American and Alaska. Next choices are United and Delta.

You can book pretty much any AF or KL flight in business class with DL, NW or CO miles (subject to availability, which is a big qualification). And I'd much rather take KL if going to points beyond AMS/CDG, since AMS is a far superior airport to transit. If going to PAR, however, SFO-CDG nonstop on AF can't be beat.

Actually depends on the route, and the phase of the moon too I guess. I ended up flying on AA for a few of my routine DEN-BOS laps this summer. During that time UA and US were asking about $420-450 R/T, NW and DL were at about $350 or so, CO was about the same with the problem of 50% EQM for non-OnePass ST programs (NW in my case). AA was $198-218.

I ended up going with LAN rather than AA as the program to accumulate into given I was flying LAN Argentina later in the year on a fare that doesn't earn on AA. But really, YMMV in terms of where to accumulate.

Your choice of where to accumulate might end up based on some oddball thing unique to your location, your planned paid travel (like my AEP-IGR LAN/4M trip) or planned awards. No one-size fits all.

AS does sound like a good program overall. Turns out they're a partner with LAN as well as NW, CO, etc. So I may just end up using my Chilean kilometers for a trip to Alaska. Or start flying AS and accumulate more into LA from their flights. All these partnerships make for weird bedfellows, don't they?

If the AS program meets your needs, with the restrictions on award stopovers etc. that others have pointed out, it could well be the best bet given the number of different RDM/EQM partners it has in different alliances.