Originally Posted by
MSPeconomist
AFAIK using pay with miles requires a DL AmEx card, but I'm not sure whether the blue one (is it really DL affiliated?) work for this. Pay with miles would allow you to get a ticket for a friend or relative and use your 9,000 miles to deduct $90 from the ticket price, perhaps subject to some rounding, for any DL ticket for DL flights. This is a much better use of your remaining miles than the $50 Amazon gift card for almost 10,000 miles.
After the plane ticket is purchased, then you can downgrade your card. Check the AmEx forum to see whether AmEx currently pro-rates annual fees.
In my experience, Pay With Miles only works in 5,000 mile/$50 increments, and has to be split evenly among all tickets purchased in the transaction. So with 9k miles you could take $50 off of 1 ticket, but nothing off of 2 or more. Also, you can use PWM for tickets for yourself as well, it is not limited to buying tickets for friends or relatives.
All that said, I agree that the gift card seems like a poor value. But in the interest of full disclosure, I recently used about 5k United miles to buy a year's subscription to People Magazine for my wife. United only accounted for 4 flights out of 444 in the last 2.5 years, and the small number of miles were going to expire anyway. So it was a good value vs having them go away and getting nothing for it. Maybe the OP is in a similar situation?