Has anyone else ever discovered miles in one of their accounts that were not supposed to be there? I have a few times. Usually it is only a few hundred. One time a couple thousand appeared from what was clearly another person's flight. The interesting thing is that up until the most recent occurrence, the miles have never been found and I felt no real compunction about keeping the miles. Kind of like finding a five-dollar bill on the ground. Not enough value to feel guilty about keeping.

That is till a couple months ago. I originally hesitated sharing this experience because of the touchy nature of mile posting mistakes. This one, however, is too large not to mention.

One day this past October I was checking one of my airline accounts on-line that had been quite active with flights. I was actually planning a vacation and was closely watching for miles to post from recent flights so I could book the award tix.

Out of the blue that fall morning, I found almost 1.7 million miles in my account. Now I am a frequent flyer, but not that frequent. No record of a transaction adding the miles, just a larger bottom line than I had expected. I was startled, not surprisingly. The first thing I did was call the automated system to check if it was a glitch in the web-based system. Nope! The phone said the miles were there and available for redemption.

I immediately found myself facing a moral dilemma. Should I say anything? If I had been walking down the street and found a bag filled with over $40,000 (1.7mil miles x $.025) and a driver’s license, I would not have a second thought about calling the police and turning the money over. Clearly I knew the miles did not belong to me, but rather the airline. So what should I do?

I decided to book the tickets that were already reserved and the remaining miles for which would post in a few days. I had been worried that all the good seats on the award flights would be taken before I could book them and this would insure I got the bulk head seats I wanted. I toyed with the idea of upgrading the award to 1st class, but that would have put a dent in the miles that were not mine. As fate would have it and saving me further moral anguish, no 1st class award seats were available on my flight itinerary. 1st had open seats, just no award seats. So I booked my coach award and got my seats at the front of the coach cabin.

By the next morning, I had decided to call the airline and make them aware of their mistake. Besides being the right thing to do, I hoped that maybe they would give me some kind of reward for “finding” their lost miles. I was planning to coyly mention the ideas that had crossed my mind about 1st class seats on the award and hope they might upgrade the tickets as the reward.

Well, before I called that morning I checked my mileage balance one more time. The miles were gone. Not a trace. The award had posted, but so had my recent flights. So there was not even a negative balance to indicate anything odd had happened. I found myself wondering if I had dreamed the entire episode. I also began to wonder if when I booked my award with the customer service rep, a red flag was raised on my account that was resolved over night?

Anyway, it was an interesting experience that I wanted to share. I also wondered how many others might have had anything like this occur to them?

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Two wrongs may not make a right, but three lefts do.