The more and more I think about it, the more I tend to lean towards this line of thought. It would seem beneficial to maintain silver or gold on DL, but it appears to me that I should strive for Plat or EPlat on AA in the long-run. Just doing a quick recap of the DL forum threads pertaining to SM devaluation can cause one to have nightmares. On the other hand, AAdvantage is the oldest and largest FFP in existence for a reason.

This all begs the question: how much effort needs to be put into booking flights during a challenge? Would you schedule the maximum number of segments or book the highest possible fare class?

Fare class appears the winner in my book. An increase in segments would contribute to an increased risk of ops or weather issues, and might not be necessary unless the increase in segments correlated to an increase in EQMs. However, full fares collect 1.5 points per EQMs, which would make it much easier to fulfill the challenge requirement.

Sorry to all for the back and forth mentality; choosing a FFP is much more difficult than I could have expected!

Elite Qualifying Points are the key in an AA challenge - depending upon the fare class, a ton of segments earning EQPs at 50% of flight miles could get tiresome (e.g. BNA-ORD is invariably 205 EQPs when I fly that route due to cost).*

* I would be booking an itinerary with really long segments, perhaps associated with a large RDM mileage bonus ...

When I was going to college in BNA, I was a WN flier (the frequency and cheapness of MDW flights was great). Now that my parents no longer live in Chicago, but abroad (Canada) and my travel is much more varied, I am a NW (and now, sadly, DL) flier. While I'm not happy about the devaluations to the program which have occured since DL's takeover, I'm sticking with them because they still represent the best options for me.

I completed a challenge for plat status on AA last year and I would be happy to answer any questions you have via PM or otherwise.

As icurhere2 already mentioned, its all about Elite qualifying points (EQP), not segments or elite qualifying miles. 10,000 EQP is really not very hard to achieve if you do any long-haul travel. I just scheduled my challenge around a trip to SCL (~10,000 miles), booked the outbound in deep discount (0.5 EQP) and the return in regular discount (1.0 EQP). It wound up costing me about $120 more than booking the whole trip at the cheapest price. With the rest of my scheduled travel I hit the 10,000 EQP mark with the 3 months without a problem. If you ever take 2 long-haul trips (>10,000 miles) within 90 days then no adjustment is needed.

I had been asked to reply to this thread and had dragged my feet--I think it's basically a wash between the two; it really depends on where you need to go and when. My wife traveled nearly constantly between BNA and LAX for about for years, and took the nonstop Sunday evening AA1307 on a regular basis, coming back either on a Thursday redeye through ORD or DFW or on a Friday's nonstop AA1974 from LAX-BNA (WN and AA are the only two carriers to offer nonstops between the two). She made EXP fairly quickly and was upgraded nearly every time. I took DL between Nashville and Seattle for a while and was generally happy with DL, although I found getting upgrades very difficult with DL as a Silver and not much easier as a Gold. (I can count the number of times I've ever been upgraded on DL on one hand.) For our (especially her) purposes, I'd probably go with AA, but it's not a slam-dunk. I would only fly UA out of BNA under duress--I can't think of any circumstance under which it ever made sense for me.

Now I live in SoCal and don't have to fly for work, so this is not nearly as important to me as it used to be.

Just a quick update:

Last week, I received notification from Northwest that my Silver Dividend status has been matched through the end of the 2009 program year. I currently have a whopping total of 4 EQS on NW/DL (yes, combined), and will not be traveling until mid-September at the earliest. This leads me to believe that if I were to go with DL/NW, I would not meet the FO criteria by December 31st. I would have to request status match by Delta (as I believe that my status match with NW is not shared with DL) at the beginning of 2010.

At the same time as I put in my request of status match to NW, I attempted the same with AA. The response that I received falls in line with AA's policy in reference to status challenges:

This past week while on vacation with my father (who frequently travels out of BNA), we discussed my current dilemma in choosing between DL and AA. He has been a member of the Admirals club for over the past decade and mentioned that he will continue to do so. He recommended, without hesitation, that I choose to fly with AA out of BNA. He obviously prefers to travel on AA when cost-effective and feels it would be the right decision for me.

Moving in just about one month from today; can't wait to get home!

Thanks again to everyone for your feedback and recommendations!

I live in Chicago, but have been traveling to BNA regularly since 1997 on business. I refuse to fly anything but WN on Chicago-Nashvile, and I have Gold on AA and PremEx on UA. Too many IRROPS to justify higher prices on lousy RJs. In general, AA's mainline route network to points NE of Nashville is garbage since DFW is not a realistic connecting city. You're looking at 2 RJs to virtually anywhere except LGA, BOS, or PHL.

OTOH, Delta's is a bit limited to the west. MEM/CVG are lousy connection cities due to the RJs, so you're looking at Atlanta (lots of service), Detroit, Minneapolis, or the lone non-stop to SLC (6am out, 9pm back).

The wild card is WN. WN has non-stop or one-connection service to a lot of cities, including very good coverage to the west coast.

With all of this in mind, I'd probably pick DL. More cities with F service, far better coverage east of the Mississippi via ATL/DTW, reasonable options to the west coast without backtracking via SLC/MSP. A better chance at getting through your work week without killing somebody, offset by higher redemption rates for when you want to go on vacation. But if you end up doing 40 4-segment trips per year with at least 1/3 of those trips to points west of Nashville, you'd be well-served by getting Platinum on AA as well.