Dividend Miles or Skymiles
 

New to FlyerTalk, new to the FF miles game...

Over the years, I've accrued between 30K and 40K miles in each of my DM and Delta SM accounts. I'm going to use up those miles for some travel I'm planning in the future. However, from now on I want to concentrate on only one of the accounts.

I fly maybe 5 times a year from PHL on US Airways (they are generally the cheapest to places like LAS and BOS from PHL). So, I accrue very little in terms of actual "preferred" miles -- and thus I'm not interested in the elite/chairman level programs.

I have both the new US Airways MC and the AMEX Skymiles Gold cards. I've been using the MC to book my recent trips on US Airways (3x miles). I also stay at the Marriot half a dozen times a year and have my Marriot Rewards linked to my DM account. In addition, I have about 25K in AMEX membership rewards points, that I could transfer. The issue is...that DM no longer participates in MR -- and thus my only choice is to transfer to SM.

My question...moving forward which account should I stick to? Will the merger with American West make the DM program better? I'm mostly interested in seat availability for award purchases (from my own research, I've seen complaints about limited seats on Delta)

Thanks

Welcome to flyertalk. I assume you are in Philly and that would make me go with DM if it were me. I am in a similar position but fly alot more. I will not (most of the time) fly out of loyalty, just price. I therefor end up with a collection of miles from different airline, but US is my main carrier. I of course pay for my own tickets. Makes a difference. Good luck.

I am in the Philadelphia area, but I don't mind flying out of any of the New York area airports (EWR/LGA/JFK) either. I recently just flew to LAS from JFK...

I also fly only based on price (most of travel is business related, however, we travel with limited budgets) and out of PHL the cheapest is usually US (although Airtran/Southwest do compete very well.) I do have a little animosity towards US...they've lost my luggage several times...

-gn

US versus Delta
 

I would definitely stick with Dividend Miles. I have over a million miles on US and have had very few problems booking awards on US. However, I have 200,000 miles on Delta that I've never been able to use, unless I want to book a SkyChoice award for double the miles! I have never been able to book a SkySaver Award for the dates and destination that I want, even trying 10 months out. I've almost given up trying. But, whenever I'm booking an award, I always try Delta first just to see, and inevitably end up going to US and getting the dates that I want at the standard mileage rate.