pgupta--I agree that, by and large, it is best to use one preferred carrier. being here in Philadelphia, we don't have too much choice, since it's a US Air hub anyway. but sometimes there are deals on other airlines which are too good to pass up, or we are flying to places that US doesn't fly to, such as ABQ, Hawaii, etc. So, occasionally we have flown on paid tickets on other carriers. I also agree that there are a variety of other promotions that are available to try to get non-flying FF miles. However, my point was that if you have about 5000 stranded miles on some airline, rather than trying to find another 20,000 miles through non-flying promotions, a good alternative is to combine them into a Hilton account, to make them usable together with other similarly orphaned miles.

Djlawman