You know, my passion is not collecting ff miles for the sake of ff miles, my passion is travel, and miles are a means to that end.

I collect miles when and where I can (including charging my Priceline.com ticket to my Delta AMEX card ... be interesting to see if I get the 50% for buying a DL ticket ...), but in this case I decided I wanted to travel somewhere and I had to figure out how. I could have tried spending miles, but I decided it would not be a good use of my hard earned miles. A regular ticket would have cost me $500, which was beyond my budget ... so I gave Priceline a shot (knowing I'd get DL most likely if I got a ticket) and got a $500 ticket for $185 ($165 + $20 tax). To me, spending an extra $300 on a ticket for a short trip just to earn 5,000 miles and 4 segments and possibly the opportunity to upgrade was not worth it. In fact, not only would it not have been worth it, it would have been financially unfeasible. Therefore, my choice was really not take the trip or use Priceline, and to be honest the choice was easy!

Now, I can certainly understand if you've had a bad experience with the company, but I've read through all the postings and the only truly "bad" experience I've found is demeter having to fight a faulty charge on his credit card. All the other complaints have been about no ff milage, no choice in times and flights (both of which are explicitly stated by the company), and the company not accepting "reasonable bids", which is also well within their rights.