Ok i need an advise from all you guru's.
What to do with your miles do you use them or keep piling them up like george clooney was doing for some extra perks as it keeps on showing in you account?

And if you use it then do you guys prefer use them on ugrades or to get a economy class ticket?

I have around 130k advantage miles sitting around but need an advise that either keeping them is good or just keep on using them as soon as i am availabe for award?

Another thing is do the airlines really care about how many miles you have in your advantage account or it all depends on your advantage status?

Any input willbe appreciated.

until about 5 yrs ago, my wife & me would do 3-5 intl trips/yr & i would do a couple more to argentina....we would use mi's to upgrade then....now, we get awards for family and ourselves for domestic [i'm doing an award trip to south america in may]...

the air lines would like you to not use mi's if you will fly them on a paid ticket....good luck...

I myself just pile them up and do not really use them except on emergency situations. If for some reason I have to travel at last minute, I compare how much it cost me vs using mile. Another thing I use them is to fly friends and family over for the holidays. Whatever you decide, if you are not actively flying with AA, I suggest you try and keep account active, otherwise you will loose the miles.

I keep enough for a trip or two, and use all the rest. Upgrades, Red Carpet Club, free trips for friends, etc.

There's really no real reason to pipe up bazillions of them, there's not really much sense, to me at least, in earning them if you don't use them.

Trouble I run into is finding the time to take reward flights, since I need enough time to take all the flights to qualify and then re-qualify each year.

If I take 15-20 flights to earn 100,000 miles which earns me 200,000 redememable miles, I find it hard to get even more time to take the 4-5 bonus flights that 200,000 miles would earn me

Use miles to secure J International awards (like GIG this Thursday), use for friends that could not afford the flight, and this year used miles to pay for AC membership as the various RDMs promotions on AA gave me about 400K miles by year end 2009.

I bank with AA. Basically I tend not to use my miles "lightly", eg, domestic trips or even simple international rt's. I like to keep them for One World awards, like visiting (from ORD) several of SFO, NRT, HKG, BKK, SIN, DEL, NBO, IST, LHR, NYC in business class: friends or family in many of those places. ^

For simple round-trips, I prefer to buy my own ticket, so I can earn more miles for the trip, but I would buy award tickets for family members, depending on the situation.

Please note that at least with AA your status does not depend on how many miles your account has at the moment. In depends on how many paid miles you flew during the past year or how many lifetime miles you have earned form all sources including flying, credit cards, gifts, CS bonuses resulting from complaints, etc, whether they are sitting in the account or have been spent.

My thoughts on your questions:

1. It doesn't matter how many miles you have in your account on any airline that I know of. It's all dependent upon how many miles you've earned that year or in your lifetime on some airlines.

2. I have a rough value for miles (between 1 and 2 cents per mile, depending upon the airline). If I can get a ticket cheaper than that, I'll buy it; otherwise I'll use the miles, no matter when/where I'm going.

3. As to whether to use the miles for flights or for upgrades, it all depends upon your wants and needs. If you're fine sitting in Y for your trip, why burn the extra miles for the up-front seats? Personally, if the flight is less than ~11 hours, I'll sit in Y. Otherwise, it's worth the extra miles to pony up to F.