As do many of the FT faithful on this board, I have a spouse who frequently accompanies me on our vacations with free trips. However, she flies very little herself, and rarely on anything other than a free ticket. As a result she has a few miles on a number of carriers, but no real likelihood of working up to enough miles to earn a free ticket anytime soon.
Just realized that the best use of her miles is to open a Hilton Mutual Fund account, with both of our names on it, and then take all of her miles and add them into our combined Hilton account. I figure that she has about 5000 miles on 4 carriers, one of which is American, so that converts to about 35,000 Hilton points. Enough for some good Hilton awards (especially since I can combine it with me @100,000 points).
I am sure someone here has figured out this strategy before and posted it, but i don't recall it, so I thought I would post it here again. Posted here instead of in Hilton, because it would be of interest to people who don't necessarily already have a Hilton account. My wife doesn't have one, but this is the best way to combine the small amounts of miles she has on several carriers.

Djlawman

If you make use of the special promotion period for American-Hilton, you can get 40,000 Hilton pts.

With such low miles its probably better to stick with one carrier where the miles do not expire. Or if you fly British Airways partner airlines, get the miles on BA where you can combine your points with three other people.

Another possible approach in such situations is to try to get partner bonuses (miles for phone bills, credit cards, misc. promotions like the Healthy Choice, Diner Club transfers) in the account(s) of the partner with fewer miles.

Are these Hilton mutual fund accounts a way of transferring miles from one partner to the other

eg I might transfer some miles in my mileage plus account into a Hilton Mutual fund account and thence into my wife's mileage plus account. There is a heavy cost to such transfers (about 60%) but I like the idea. Can this be done?

cheers Peter

making hotel and car rental reservations on such trips with Gisela, I use my (preferential) cards at reservation time (to get the preferrential treatment).

During my hotel stay (latest before/at check-out) or when bringing the rental car back, I will ask them to (please) credit the miles into my wife's account instead of mine. (sometimes it might even happen to have a double credit ...).

I was faced with the exact situation you describe. As a result of following FT threads, I set up a Hilton Fund Mutual account and except for our AA miles (not in their program at the time), transferred most of our ODDS and ENDS flier miles from various airlines to Hilton Honors.
Then transferred just enough air miles back to TWA for 2 free tickets which we have since used.
Even though it works out that you pay approximately 3 old good miles for 1 useable new mile, its worth it.(5000 air miles =10000 HH:: 10000 HH=1500 air miles).
Better to have a useable award than have to pay for a ticket and still have odd old miles floating around.

pgupta--I agree that, by and large, it is best to use one preferred carrier. being here in Philadelphia, we don't have too much choice, since it's a US Air hub anyway. but sometimes there are deals on other airlines which are too good to pass up, or we are flying to places that US doesn't fly to, such as ABQ, Hawaii, etc. So, occasionally we have flown on paid tickets on other carriers. I also agree that there are a variety of other promotions that are available to try to get non-flying FF miles. However, my point was that if you have about 5000 stranded miles on some airline, rather than trying to find another 20,000 miles through non-flying promotions, a good alternative is to combine them into a Hilton account, to make them usable together with other similarly orphaned miles.

Djlawman