Bereavement Miles Redemption
 

I did a search on this, most of the threads are quite old.

I had a death of a friend recently, and was surprised to see that my local airline (US) now seems to block off all "saver" 25,000 mile inventory for 3 days after the current date-- not good for funeral travel. I've booked for this purpose with them in the past with no trouble.

I think AA charges a significant fee for short-term redemption.

Are there thoughts about what the best airline to keep 25,000 miles "in pocket" for that short term emergency is??

Thanks

AA's "expedite fee" ($100 for last minute redemption) is despicable, but it's only $100, which is a far sight better than buying full Y fares. And the "expedite fees" are waived for top-tier elites (EXP). AA has always come thru for me when I ask for a last-minute 25k coach award or a last minute 45k first class award.

Counterbalancing the offensiveness of the $100 fee is the extensive availability on AA, unless the funeral is in a popular destination like Hawaii or Orlando. ;)

I've had to do it - used my NW miles to bring some relatives home on short notice -- and was able to get them seats at the normal rate of miles per trip.

It was a case of miles well used.

In situations like this, you have some (but not a lot) of flexibility of times/dates.

Bob H

I haven't had good luck. Had to use double DL miles for 4 people into MCO for a funeral. It wiped out almost my whole account. I didn't try to use my plat status to get single miles.

I had a death in the family a couple of weeks ago and I got 2 last minute tickets on Frontier Airlines for only 15,000 each and that was 48 hours before my flight was to take off.

Last Thursday I booked a last minute saver award in F on United from ORD to SEA with about 18 hours notice for 40K miles.

Sadly, United will be doing the execrable "expediting" fee that AA currently has ($75 instead of $100), but it won't start until October...

Alaska Airlines (AS) is also really good for this. They have 20k award tickets (25k on partners) and the awards on AS metal have no Saturday stay or advanced booking requirement. I booked two such tickets for SEA-DEN last week on about 4 hours notice to get my wife and her brother to a funeral in Colorado. Delta and United wanted almost $1,000 per ticket.

Several airlines (I'm familiar with United) provide a 50% discount off of the fair for berevment. This has been a better deal for me in the past than using miles.

I'm going through this now with my family, we had a death in the family with the funeral scheduled in Seattle on Saturday, and as soon as we had our tickets all booked for that my Grandmother passed away with her funeral scheduled for Monday in Kansas. Between award tickets, non-rev benefits, bereavement fares, and WN ticketless travel funds we're all going to get where we need to be without going broke. I think between all of us we have redeemed tickets using WN credits, CO, UA and YX miles. Collectively we'll end up stepping on the respective planes of AS, YX, US, UA, WN, CO, and NW.

Thank you
 

Looks like NW is a decent option--

50% off of the full Y fare was still running in the $400 range for the flights I would have needed-

So if I could have burned 25k miles I would have done so.

AA and UA's redemption fees (In October apparantly) make it a lot less attractive-- putting my "value of miles" at the 1c point, where I figure I might as well just pay for a ticket.

So, NW will get a ticket every now and then from me, just to keep a little in the emergency bank.

Thanks for the input