Which airline program has the least surcharges on award flights?? What happened to the days of awards being just that, an award??

Southwest Rapid Rewards.

I hear ya. I was trying to book some award tix on Delta but the costs were ridiculous per ticket. This nickle and dime stuff is out of control.

Probably the same thing that happened to the days of cheap oil. @:-)

Anyhow, if you are a 1K or Global Services member on United, you pay no surcharges, other than legally required taxes (such as the 9/11 fees on domestic flights, or various taxes on international flights). So, at least in some cases, the answer depends on your status with the airline.

In June Delta charged me $10 for my awards ticket to Hawaii. I recently looked up the same flight for 2009 and the surcharge was over $67. I know the fuel surcharge comes into play, but there are sure milking it.

Southwest Airlines is indeed the literal winner here. However, their points (trip, not mileage based program) do expire and so you have to be pretty active with them to get benefit out of the program. With WN award availability is starting to become an issue on a level similar to other major US airlines, at least if what I am reading on the WN forum is representative. They are also not going to fly everwhere in NA some of us need to go. For some, using them as their domestic airline and using a credit card program like Thank you points to get an occasional free international business class trip might be the way to go.

As already implied in this thread, Delta is leading the way to putting award ticket programs in the toilet (right now I calculate that using Skymiles might be a reasonable option for less than 5% of my trips and that percentage is still declining). With Delta it is not just the surcharges and other added fees of all kinds but all kinds of mileage requirement surcharges on award tickets depending on the routing and the airline combinations.

In summary, there's no really perfect answer to your question; you do get out of a lot of the fees and hassles though if you fly over 75k or 100k miles with your primary airline (i.e., your status is at their highest published tier).