[d_herring]

Butch,

All the US airlines suck these days. I'm not saying United is good but they sure take better care of high-value passengers than Delta does. Imagine after the Delta-Northwest merger is approved. Delta will be even worse (although their SEA routes will vastly improve). I fly close to 400,000 miles annually. Half of those miles are domestic. I pay full-fare every time I fly. This includes full-fare Business Class prices when I fly internationally. This doesn’t mean crap to Delta. Those airlines you mentioned can’t offer me the kind of year-round service I need. BTW – it wasn’t not too long ago when I could fly anywhere at anytime using Delta or any of her partners. SkyTeam is too big now. This means too many seats have to be allocated for SkyTeam partners. Too many partners means less seats for Delta. If I want to travel international in Business class with my wife I can't because Skyteam, and affliliate airlines, only allocate one business class seat for their partners on flights. It also means all partners are blacking out key periods of the year. In my case June is premium – otherwise I would have flown Korean or Northwest to Manila. I never heard of China Southern before Delta dumped me on them. But to answer your question about how important frequent flyer miles are – of course they are. Why in the world would one not take award miles into account when traveling.

DH