I accumulated high enough mileage in my account and recently decided to use 25,000 miles of it to get a domestic round trip ticket for a friend. I made the reservation on Jan 22. The first inconvenience came: the tickets must be mailed to me instead of directly to my friend. Well, that's berable.
I just waited, and did not see any tickets till Jan 28. I called. To my great surprise, the tickets were not issued ot mailed yet. The US Airways lady could not figure out why this could happen. Well, again, I beared with this. I asked the US Airways lady if I could request faster delivery service than the regular mail with my own credit card. The US Airways lady asked her supervisor and returned with a seemingly good news: US Airways will pay for the over-night delivery, and the tickets should arrive on Jan 30.
However, the tickets did not arrive on Jan 30. I called again that night. I was told by a gentleman that the tickets were sent out to me today (1/30) via regular mail ! That gentleman sounded sympathetic, but was unable to do anything.
If someone from US Airways called me and told me why the tickets could not be issued during 1/22 - 1/28, ... If US Airways could not send the tickets via over-night delivery on 1/29 and called me to explain before the tickets were out in regular mail, ... Now, I would be too dumb if I still don't get angry.
I am not sure if the tickets will ever arrive in 5 - 7 days in regular mail. But I am sure that I will never add one single mile to the Dividended Miles account and will avoid US Airways whenever possible.

Most airline's policy for redemption of awards is to send the rewards to the members address -- this helps prevent fraud.

Most airlines do not process award requests immediately (well, TWA is aparently an exception -- see the TWA section). The request enteres a queue and is processed as the airline has time. As long as the flight was not within 21 days of request, the awards are sent out via regular mail. If the award flight was within 21 days of the request, you would have had to pay a processing fee for the expidited service.

It was nice of US Airways to offer to send the tickets to you overnight -- however, they were not required to. In addition, even though you requested that the tickets be sent priority -- you did not request it at the time of the award redemption. Even though it may annoy you that US did not send them out overnight, you should have them within a few days (assuming you live in the US) and you should have them in time for your travel.

As to your comment about US Airways calling you to tell you when your tickets would be processed, I side with US Airways -- they have millions of members and are not and should not be required to call and tell you when your tickets are being processed. When you redeemed your miles, you chose not to ask when the tickets would be processed. The agent would have told you if you needed expidite service based on your travel dates. Since the agent did not tell you you needed an expidite service, you would have received your tickets with time to spare. I would be willing to be that other airlines would have processed your tickets in the same manner and would not have offered to Fedex your tickets for free if you were outside the 21 day window.

Maybe next time you should ask for an e-ticket and then have them e-mail AND mail a confirmation to you. That's what I did last Friday with my award travel redemption on TWA. I received my e-mail confirmation within two hours of making eight ticket reservations.

Being cautious though, I want the mailed confirmation so I have the e-ticket on airline letterhead to back up my reservation. That's just in case - since you never know what will happen when you travel.

I think HoneyBee's got a point.

In early December, I redeemed miles for 1 r/t 1st class domestic ticket in February and bought another on a discount fare, using customer service upgrades. I did not have both tickets (well, one ticket and one e-ticket confirm)in hand until last week, after three calls on my part.

I have always received AA frequent flyer tickets within a week of redeeming the miles.

US must be pretty jammed up -- hope their new SABRE computer system helps things out.

Charlie