I gave up on trying to use SkyMiles for either international upgrades or award tickets.

For years, I would fly TLV-JFK-LAS-ATL-TLV by buying M fares, upgrading them with SkyMiles, and then earning enough SkyMiles on the trip to do it again the next time.

Then Delta stopped the upgrading on M fares and required the more expensive B fares. I wasn't thrilled about that but I accepted it.

At that point I found that it was very difficult to find flights with upgrade space that go back to TLV within a reasonable period (one to two weeks) after flying out of TLV.

Finally, it got to the point where it was impossible to find them. I decided to empty my SkyMiles account by getting an award ticket for this itinerary. That was two years ago and there was only one such combination available -- leaving on Dec 24 and returning in early January. Even there, however, I could not get the ticket for the entire itinerary. I bought it for the TLV-JFK and ATL-JFK-TLV segments but had to pay for JFK-LAS-ATL.

I now have 42,617 SkyMiles in my account. They represent what I had left over after that itinerary plus some SkyMiles I got from flying AZ to Italy a few times. These SkyMiles will undoubtedly remain orphaned (perhaps the number will increase with partner flights to Europe) as I will never have enough for a trip to the US and it makes no sense to use them to fly to Europe -- not only are award itineraries on partners hard to find but the taxes and fees are so high that there is really no difference in just paying for my flights.