The truly wealthy people in this world do not give a rip about affinity cards. They could care less about free seats on a commercial airliner shared with a bunch of total strangers.

It was a nice post, though.

'07 has been a very good award redemption year for me. By year's end, we will have done three full family vacations (4 award seats per itin) using miles, plus a handful of other individual trips or freebies we've given to others to visit us. I'm doing one solo later this year - U.S. to Germany in F on LH.

The seats are there, you just need to know how/where to look. Yes, in some ways the game is a bit more difficult to play (especially at peak travel times), but that's more due to high revenue loads, not some mysterious cabal of really rich people who enjoy flying commercial just to hack you off.

Edited to add: Just doing some math here...my burn this year is 470,000 plus a handful of WN awards and a couple of DBCFREE's (United's VDB tickets). My earn has been somewhat lower on the air side (maybe 200k), but very high on the hotel side. I could pull the trigger on a couple of Marriott Travel Packages if I had to get more air miles...