Interestingly, the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf chain dropped its buy ten, get one free card without notice--leaving outstanding, unredeemed cards, worthless. The story I heard was that there had been so much counterfeiting of the cards on color printers and fake sales on the internet that they had to drop redemption.

FFPs are a different story, but, as, IMHO, the present business model of the big carriers is doomed in the near future, unless something dramatic happens to fuel prices, the FFPs are likely to go down along with them. As long as the oil guys run Washington nothing helpful is likely to happen.

Meanwhile, I am using up as many miles as reasonably possible (thanks AA for that free trip to Europe in biz coming up next month! ). And, I am even looking at converting miles to hotel nights, although I haven't found a good conversion for AA miles, yet (suggestions?).

Now, my Starwood Amex is my main credit card because I hope Amex's and Starwood's business is more likely to survive.