Delta

 I have done way too much research, but I'm changing my preferred airline from Delta to American.

Growing up in Seattle, it had been mostly Alaska. There was some Southwest thrown in there, but I hadn't really ever given it a lot of thought.

I've come to learn over the years that I never want to try Spirit, but weren't all airlines the same?  I hadn't been a regular flier.  Maybe a conference each year and then there was a period where I was working remotely and had to go into the office a few days each month so that meant a lot of flying.

But in my current job, I'm flying 5 or 6 times a year. When I did my first flight, I guess I picked American because of the time of day, but since then, I've been doing my research.

First off, all of my coworkers are flying from Salt Lake, so they take Delta. They keep telling me how great Delta is. When I go to Salt Lake, I take Delta, but it's fake Delta and it's eh. 

I recently took Avelo for a family trip and was surprised - there was more leg room than American and the seats were more comfortable. 

So I've started looking more closely at Delta. So far, I've only found two negatives:

The flight I'd take would be at 8 am from LAX instead of 1 pm.  It would get in sooner, but that long drive to LAX would be much earlier in the day.  And the credit card is $150/yr instead of American's $99/yr (which they seem to have forgotten to charge me for this year).  

But from what I can tell, Delta has wider seats, more padding in the seats, more leg room, free wifi, seat back screens (they're working to make it possible to extend cast your phone to the screen meaning you could work from the plane with just your phone and a bluetooth keyboard, instead of your laptop).  They apparently have better food choices as well.

On the negative side for American, I just keep reading more and more negative things. Like how they give new flight attendants a letter they can use to help apply for food stamps (because American pays so poorly).  Delta doesn't have a union because their flight attendants have never voted to unionize.

Delta's mechanics are so good at their jobs that they do maintenance work for other airlines - they do lots of the type of work mechanics enjoy, leaving the less fun urgent stuff to local airline mechanics.

American seems to be trying to be OK.  Delta just seems to be trying to be great.  Time to listen to my coworkers. Why did it take so long for me to listen to my coworkers? Because I have points. It's amazing how much stuff like that mentally locks you in.

Also, American's auditors are KPMG. KPMG is bad.

If anything here is wrong, it's just a mistake in my research.