Rumblings of major ff devaluation in UA/CO merger

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Airline mergers are hell for frequent flyer programs. When Air France bought KLM, they merged the ff programs and created a brand new one, Flying Blue, which was a pale ghost of the previous outstanding Frequence Plus of Air France and decent Flying Dutchman of KLM. and it has gotten even worse since. Then Delta took over Northwest, and again it was a major devaluation from either of the predecessor programs, alhough it kept the SkyMiles name.

Now United is merging with Continental, and there are rumblings of a similar result there:

Blog speculation on UA/CO new Mileage Plus scheme - FlyerTalk Forums

If this pans out, it looks like I will have to start flying a different AAirline.