CO vs NW
 

Most of my travel with be domestic based, possibly 1 Asia trip and 1 trip to Europe per year. I'm looking mainly for upgrades - pay or not pay. Which programme is best for me? Home aeroport has full service of both.

I've flown NW FC to Europe once and was very impressed; never flown CO.

Will do about (actual) 50k miles per annum on this programme.

Which programme is for me?

since CO is moving to *A this year (possibly as late as 12-31) your LH HON should be good enough here. NW is merging with DL and offers quite good upgrades for GE/PE (50k/75k miles required per year).

If CO is merging with NW wouldn't they enter *A?

NW was bought by DL; that is the merger that is happening, not CO.

From NYC you are going to get more non-stop flights on CO out of EWR than you will on DL/NW. As a gold (which is where you'll be with 50K miles) you'll not get too many free upgrades on CO. I think that NW will have more for you in that regard domestically.

Neither has free upgrades TATL/TPAC, and the rules on how they process their upgrades are rather different. On DL/NW you must have a ticket purchased in one of the top two or three fare buckets to use miles for an upgrade. On CO any fare is upgradeable but you have a co-pay of up to $500 each way as part of the upgrade costs, in addition to the miles. Personally I prefer the co-pay approach, but you might feel otherwise.

cfischer miswrote. NW is merging with Delta.

CO is notorious for low upgrades, particularly out of EWR.

I've had great luck with upgrades on NW, but I'm switching to CO because of the merger.

oops, just fixed it :o

I'd go with NW

I go by my choice of products served: CocaCola, Bombay Sapphire and Cointreau. CO uses Bombay Sapphire fleetwide while NW only on international biz. NW serves Pepsi products (I only like Mt Dew) while CO uses CocaCola. Good thing is that I believe NW will switch to Coke b'cos of DL's position in ATL. I like drowning my ice-cream in Cointreau (only on NW int'l biz) or will switch to cheap port (usually Fonseca 27) on CO flights.

Go with NW if you travel more internationally. Once the DL merger is completed, you'll get 2 SWU (system wide upgrades) upon reaching platinum elite level. With NW, the gate agents in NRT usually will process op-ups more liberally when they see a platinum or gold elite cards. My op-up chances are about 80% out of NRT (mostly to HNL and SIN).

Go with CO if you will do most flights domestically in the USA. The EUA on short hauls from EWR and most flights out of LGA/JFK are usually good. Long hauls out of EWR (esp transcon flights) are usually battleground upgrades for gold elites.