Well, regardless of whether or not you're tweaking us, welcome to FT! Now that you're here, I think you'll find people who can help you with strategies to redeem your miles. I fly about half of your volume and have found - partly with the help of this board - that it's pretty easy to amass a huge cache of miles (and no, I don't spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on credit cards
).
Check out the UA forum and the Star Alliance forum. Lots of good info in both... The one tip that I found here that has helped me a lot this year is to sign up for ANA's FF program. My balance there is 0 miles, but just by having an account I can search award availability across most of the Star Alliance. United doesn't allow you to do this - even if you hit 1K. So I use ANA to find my award seats, then use UA to actually book them.
There are other availability tools out there that can also help with Oneworld or Skyteam - search Travelbuzz or the AA/CO forums for more info.
Trust me - the award seats are out there waiting to be claimed.
Originally Posted by eyechip
I mean let's open our eyes here...the airlines have ultimitly involved us all in one of the biggest shell games in history??
This definitely crosses my mind. It's a primary reason I try to keep my overall earning and redemptions roughly in-line. Right now, I worry that I have too many hotel points - leaves me vulnerable to Category Creep if I continue to amass and don't start burning them off a bit.