First of all, I don't expect my miles to vanish in a merger, at most I expect them to be devalued. But burning them too much right now willy nilly just to use them up could devalue them just as much!

So for the most part, I'm on 2. I'm only on 1 at the margins. For example, I just booked a multi-night Hilton stay for the spring which cost me 90000 HH points (on cash + points rates, but the cash component is very little per night compared to the going rate). Anyway, in large part because of these rumors, I decided to see if Redeem AA Miles still works (rumors about its demise keep being premature), and indeed it does, and so transferred 90K AA to 150K HH (for a $30 fee). I view that as perhaps a bit of "diversification".

But I have to expliain that I went from almost 1.2 million AA miles to just over 1.1 million AA miles. (And I just cmpleted $3k spend on two new Citi AA cards, and should have 100K coming from those quite soon.) That's what I mean by "at the margin".

I am booked already on tons of DEQ11/DEQAA MRs (which I can't cancel if I wanted, because the cancel fees are about the same as the fares were in the first place!) which will get me to requalify EXP this year, earning me 8 more SWUs which I don't even know if I'll be able to use all of on int'l trips despite not using any miles for int'l trevel until I use those SWUs all up.

So there's my dilemma. If I wanted to start burning, I'd either need to "waste" all my SWUs (and use miles instead of those int'l trips), and/or I'd need to make all fuure domestic trips be miles trips (even though many, even if cheap, could only be at anytime redemption rates). Which of those make sense? To me, neither.

I might, in the near future, choose a slightly lower value for deciding when to buy the fare (on a domestic flight) and when to redeem. But agian, that's a change at the margin, not a stock decision to suddenly burn at al cost.

I don't know how many of the people who say they're to going to burn are in a situation where to do that they have to either do really poor value redemptions or waste SWUs they're already financially committed to earning.

I also don't know how many of the poople who say they're going to burn (despite not having burned before) have 1+ million miles. (In my case, I have that because, priorr to the economic downturn, I never expected to be EXP more than perhaps one year in my life. But AA keeps doing DEQM promos left and right htat work for me, making it quite cheap to (re)qualify for EXP and earn those SWUs, so the year when I drop out of EXP and start burning instead of using SWUs keeps getting put off.

Obviously, those people who have just enough miles for a few big trips, and who can simply decide to take big trips now instead of little trips and big trips later, can "burn everything" more easily.

By the way, I don't even have all my eggs in one bakcet. I've got almost as many banked miles total in three other airlines: about 230k in BA, about 280k in UA/CO, and about 300k in DL. Oh, and two standard awards (left over from RR 1.x) over at Southwest that I have to use in the next year or so (or lose them).