Originally Posted by
sheremetyevo
Welcome to flyertalk.
Sorry to be harsh, but my thoughts are: do your homework before you make an investment. You wouldn't open a savings account or invest in a money market fund without reading the details and researching the bank first, would you? Or at least I wouldn't.
Like you, I'm no fan of paying fees to transfer my money/miles, but there is plenty of info on Delta's site that says that transferring costs money.
If you want my answer with my logical economist hat on, then the reason they charge fees is because otherwise everyone with piddly amounts of SkyMiles would band together to redeem them. If fees suddenly were waived, then Delta would have to give away a lot more free tickets and SkyMiles would be worth even less than they are now.
+1 to everything in this post, from welcome to FT to the reason why airlines charge for mileage transfers to the fact that you should take the time to read how the program works.
Also, Low coach tickets to Europe cost 60k each. You stated you already have over 100k in your account. If he has 60k in his account, you can just book one ticket from each account. And if he doesn't have enough, it will cost $200 or less for you to transfer the miles into your account. Not really "astronomical".