<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Beckles:
The fatal flaw of your theory is that you forget that award seats are capacity controlled, so there's not much chance that an airline taking over the miles would have planes full of freeloaders unless they wanted it that way ...</font>
But most programs allow you claim an award free of capacity controls at twice the mileage level. Although most people are reluctant to do this, they may be much more willing to do so if miles that otherwise would have become useless get moved into another carrier's program that they have no intention of using on a regular basis.