My wife has the following mileage balances:

American - 20759 (expires 8/05)
Delta - 16427 (expires 12/03)
Continental - 6479 (expires?)
Northwest - 19222 (expires?)
United - 14307 (expires??? - last activity: December 2000)

I couldn't seem to find any expiration info for CO and NW, do these expire? Also, I am assuming UA will expire at the end of the year, but I couldn't find any details.

What is a good use of these miles? (Or what is an easy way to extend the expiration so that they can be useful.)

(She is also not likely to fly a paid flight on any airline in the near future.)

Well, you generally need to nudge those balances up to 25k per account for them to be useful for a free domestic ticket. Since you need to have some activity, that should push out any expiration dates to at least 2006. On most majors, miles expire after three years of no activity (although some define redemption as activity and some don't).

I'd recommend the following:

- AA: Make this your primary iDine airline. Use iDine + maybe a long-distance carrier to get yourself to 25k via mostly normal spending. Look on the AA board for occasional one-off 500 or 1000 mile earning opportunities. Look on AA.com to see if you can earn a few miles by switching your email statement preferences. (Actually, do this for all of your accounts.) You probably DON'T need to run out and get the AA Mastercard because there are so many odd AA partners, unless you can get in on that deal where the bonus miles post before the annual fee hits. (Again, see the AA forum.)

- DL: Get a DL Amex with 10,000 bonus miles.

- CO: Don't know. Maybe push these through Amtrak to another program? I have never flown CO and don't know anything about their program.

- NW: If there is a way to get those CO miles to NW, do that - even if you have to take a hit on the conversions. Then nudge up NW to 25k with iDine and/or LD carrier.

- UA: Get the Mileage Plus Visa with 15k bonus miles.

So for UA and DL, you are simply 2 credit card annual fees ($85 and $60, I believe) away from 2 free tickets. For AA and NW, you are close enough to get there with "normal" spending, assuming that you use the occasional iDine restaurant (which isn't a stretch in Chicago).

Edited to add: If you are very patient, and simply want to avoid having miles expire, you can iDine all of these airlines (except maybe CO - don't know about them). That activity will preserve your balances if you simply want time to think about what to do next. My recommendations assume that you want your free tickets in a somewhat timely manner, therefore justifying the credit card fees.

[This message has been edited by pinniped (edited 07-25-2003).]

I would immediately sign up every credit card I owned with the Idine program, each with a different airline. Then use each card once in an Idine restaurant and the posted miles will extend the expiration date of your account. If you only have one credit card, hook it up to one airline immediately, eat at an Idine restaurant once, then change the affiliation of the card to another airline and so forth and so on until all
your miles are covered.
edited to apologize for the repetition, the above posted while I was typing

[This message has been edited by Marysunshine (edited 07-25-2003).]

The miles in your wife�s United account will expire at the end of the year. Most, if not all of the airlines� frequent flyer programs, will extend the expiration of the miles in their respective accounts for another three years with merely one transaction.

Continental miles at one time did not expire, but they do now. However, Continental has had an alliance with Northwest for years, and they now have an alliance with Delta Air Lines. You eventually can fly one of the three airlines and get mileage credit in the frequent flyer program of your choosing. As far as I know, it is not possible to do this now (and I do not know for sure if it ever will be possible), but there may be an opportunity in the future to pool those miles together from those airlines for an award.

In addition to the suggestions above (pinniped and Marysunshine beat me to responding to your e-mail!), consider the following:

Perhaps use your wife's frequent flyer number from an airline different form the one which you are flying whenever renting a car from a car rental company or staying at a hotel, if the program allows it. You only need to do this once every three years per room or car rental for each airline. This will also extend the expiration date of those miles.

Join a program such as MyPoints, where points can be converted for use for United miles. See the S.P.A.M. forum for more details.

I suppose you can also �launder� her miles through various conversion programs (such as through a hotel program), but expect a significant devaluation.

You can also buy miles to be able to have enough to redeem for an award, such as on Delta Air Lines.

The miles on a few of the airlines you mentioned may be enough to use for a domestic first-class upgrade.

The bottom line is that your wife has too many miles in most of her accounts to just let them expire.

I hope you find this information helpful. Good luck, L Dude 7.

[This message has been edited by Canarsie (edited 07-25-2003).]

I agree that IDine is the best way to extend the life of miles - and there are lots of restaurants in Chicago - some even for the 20 miles instead of 10 miles per $1.00. Also since you live in chicago, have your wife sign up her dominicks card to the united program. Every time she spends $250 she gets 125 miles. That will keep them alive indefinitely. Does she have a AA citibank advantage care - not only are there bonus miles offers there are reduced mileage awards every quarter, so you spend less to get a ticket. I think the main thing is keeping them alive, you'll then see which ones are worth increasing. You could also consider an AMEX starpoints card which could then be used to top off the balance on many airlines.

------------------
Ms.DtG

Dgordon,

is there somewhere on the idine site I can find out which ones there are ? I am not to familiar with the Idine site and it only seems to display the "20% off" info, not how many miles each restaurant offers..

Thanks
J

Yikes. That CO mileage expiration seems to be one of the worst around. Does NW have an expiration now also?

Is it possible to change an idine account registered? (i.e. move it from one airline to another, or perhaps change a joint credit card to be credited to another account?)

Is it still possible to transfer CO miles to Amtrak? That looks like it may be the best use of those. Especially since accoding to CO's rules, they could be removed. (No activity for a few years now.) Is CO actually cancelling accounts?

You could transfer 5000 of your CO points to Amtrak and then onto UA with no devaluation and solve your CO and UA problems in one swoop. (Actually, you could presumably go CO --> Amtrak --> CO with no loss and solve your CO problem.)

You could take a survey at www.opinionplace.com to solve your American Airlines expiration problem.

You could also transfer points into one of the programs out of a hotel frequent guest program.

With Northwest you can also redeem some miles directly for magazines. Similarly, a milepoint.com magazine redemption would work for any of your programs that participate.

Presumably a small points.com transfer into one and out of another account works too.

iDine has already been mentioned as a good tool. Credit card signups work.

------------------
View from the Wing: A blog about Free Miles and Free Markets

FYI... CO does participate in iDine.



------------------
Bob

Has anyone actually had CO cancel any inactive account .
Just wondering.

First of all, Northwest miles don't expire (I still have the 2544 miles I accrued in 1992 with no activity since except setting up access on their website a couple months ago!), so no need to spend them on magazines if you're already 4/5 of the way to a free ticket.

One good way to add to Northwest miles gradually is to look into the World Perks Mall at their website. Basically, if you go to a number of well-known websites (inlcuding barnesandnoble.com, timelife.com, jcpenneys.com, etc) through links at the World Perks mall when you're ready to buy something from one of those sites, then you earn Northwest miles on those purchases (in addition to any miles you earn anywhere else by whatever credit card you use), and it doesn't cost you any more than if you went directly to those websites. (I'm not saying you need to do all your shopping there, just remember if/when you DO get around to thinking of buying something from one of those websites to link to it from World Perks Mall.)

You might want to look around the websites for the airlines where you do face expiration issues and see if there are any similar shopping links where you earn miles at stores you wouldn't mind shopping at anyway even if you didn't earn miles.

You can get that card with a 20,000 mile bonus. See the Credit Card page of my web site below.

------------------
Free Frequent Flyer Miles

Question about the United/Dominick's thing. Do you have to spend the $250 all in one trip? It's hard to do that unless you're a family with kids, which we are not.

Continental Airlines also offers shopping for OnePass miles in addition to other ways to earning OnePass miles.

MyPoints no longer allows conversion of points to UAL miles. You can get discount certificates which are probably useless (because they probably can't be used for web fares), or a free ticket within the lower 48 for 40,000 points.

------------------
Free Frequent Flyer Miles