sethuel1

I'm Seth, one of the cofounders. I'll walk you through our logistics. If you pledge miles through our google form it'll then be part of our internal searchable spreadsheet. We then get requests from partner NGOs for refugee family reunification cases and do our due diligence to determine best redemption and available award space, at which point we'll go to the spreadsheet to see what pledges are available.

When we find that our search can use your pledge we'll contact you and have you sign off on a nondisclosure agreement (to keep the personal information of the recipient private) and then either a) ask you to temporarily change your password and give us account access to book the tickets, or b) get on the phone with you and walk you through booking the tickets.

For taxes and fees (which we obviously try to minimize) you have the option of paying them yourself or having us pay them out of our monetary donation pool. If you donate to us the taxes/fees amount and have us actually pay them for the ticket you can take a tax deduction for the amount you donated, so many of our donors do that. If you only want to donate the miles and not pay anything in cash that is of course totally fine as well. If you pay the taxes/fees straight up you can actually not take a tax deduction on that amount per IRS rules. The miles themselves are not tax-deductible.

As you alluded to, AA requires you to use your own card to pay taxes/fees. AA is actually the only airline I know of that requires this, and we can get around that with "burner" single-use CC numbers I can auto-generate (and then put in your name) using privacy.com.

After the tickets are booked you will be apprised when the recipient has flown successfully and been reunified with their family. Sometimes you may be contacted afterward by the recipient as well, though they are under no obligation to do that.