Every company you transact with wants your continued patronage and loyalty. Whole Foods wants to send you insider offers, hotel booking companies promise you extra benefits, phone service providers offer tiered pricing based on commitments, and airlines dangle the prospect of upgrades in service and exclusive access. In the last example there are very real, very valuable rewards on offer, but sadly I will not earn any of them.
Frequent flyer programs reward passengers who repeatedly fly the same airline, or partner airlines, in an ‘alliance’ (apologies for stating the obvious). Rewards include service upgrades, airport lounge access, and luggage fee waiver.
However, as a vagabond who searches for low cost transport from point to point I simply can not be brand loyal. Tui, LATAM, Wizzair, Easyjet, and XL occupy niche markets, and regional carriers like Icelandicair, Ethiopian and Air China serve circumscribed geography. For example in West Africa your choice is essentially Air Cote D’Ivoire or walking. In the six and a half years of this experiment I have averaged a flight a week. Those hundreds of flights encouraged me to join 28 frequent flyer programs (some legs were on no name/no program carriers). At the rate that I am accruing miles/credits with each program I will be pushing up the daisies before I get any respect at all.
Update. During peak COVID I spent 500 days noodling around the US. At that point I broke down and signed up for a Chase United Airlines card. It paid for itself immediately, and I was treated like a human being instead of a galley slave by United. I confess that I am not a points/loyalty expert, but for the $100/year fee this has been a valuable addition when flying on Skyteam airlines. I would now recommend joining a loyalty program with one of the major alliances. But I would not recommend spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to max every point. Once a year, when I am reviewing all my other services, I take a look at the programs and decide if I would benefit from a major change. I recently switched to the (more expensive but more valuable to me) Chase Club card.