This reminds me of AA's two business class tickets for 160 that ended in '02. First though, that gets a WOW!

This might look weak in comparison, but how about the matching miles that were offered when DL introduced the DL Amex Platinum card. If you were among the first 10,000 people that signed up for this card online, DL matched up to 50,000 miles that you had banked in any other airlines account. That coupled with the 15k (5k are elite) miles that you normally get for obtaining this card and an additional 10k elite miles if you spend $25,000 in the year, and a companion certificate (with restrictions) made this a great deal.

I landed up with 75,000 miles without even counting the one mile you receive for each dollar you spend and also double miles on certain purchases. So in essence that first year with this card I earned in excess of 100,000 DL miles.

Two RT FC tickets US mainland to Hawaii on AA for 75,000 regular miles ("old" or pre 1989 miles). These awards are still applicable.

Two of us went to Hawaii in FC last August for 75,000 old miles and I still have about 300,000 of these non-expiring "old" miles remaining.

There seem to be two distinct categories being discussed in the replies above: best award (redemption) and best promotion (earning).

The KLM and Delta Amex offers above are clearing in the earning category.

Not weak at all: I completed that same promotion. I haven't seen anything similar before or since in terms of a straight credit card offer. I picked up 77,000 DL miles for just over $12,000 in spending. Pretty good return on one $85 annual fee.

My biggest rewards, all from pretty recent years:

- Hilton's bonus craziness: 20 total paid nights (most Hamptons) = 2 ALON awards (2 weeks in Hawaii) plus about 80,000 points left over.

- TWA promotions in Fall 2000: I forget the exact numbers, but it was pretty easy to achieve if you had business in STL like I did: buy 4 or 6 tickets via TWA.com and receive, in addition to your normal miles/bonuses, 2 free F tickets to the Caribbean and 6 months' free access to the Ambassador's Club. We redeemed the tix for Spring Break in the Caribbean, so they obviously weren't THAT capacity-controlled.

- American's current nuttiness might go down in history as a great period of time to earn bonuses upon bonuses upon bonuses. AANYC, AABOS, FLY04, EUR04, AAMC, plus a plethora of route bonuses and probably others I don't even pay attention to.

- Smaller-scale, but a lot of people must have earned miles from it: for a while I was getting a ton of bonus miles every time I flew an LGA-DCA segment. (My US Air flights would sometimes connect in LGA.) Something stupid like 3x in each of two programs. (I want to say US and AA...)

It's on a smaller scale than most of those mentioned, but in terms of value for miles, Delta's pre-1995 Medallion round trip upgrade has to be among the leaders. For 2,500 miles you'd get upgraded on any U.S. round trip itinerary - plus, since the class-of-service bonus was then based on where you sat, double miles! As long as your trip was >2,500 base miles (minimum base mileage per segment was 1,000 then, too) you would end up earning net miles for using the award, in addition to being upgraded.

A current offer that is extremely good value is the UK British Airways, American Express companion voucher. Spend �15K on the card and they give you a voucher that when you buy any ticket with BA miles, you get a second one free. A great deal that's still about. That could mean two first class tickets to South Africa for 150K or two first class tickets to Australia for 300K (both from the UK).

One other, unfortunately not available any more, would be any of the Concorde awards - however you could get to fly it for miles was worth it.

Delta's T160 (Concorde 160k) was nice.

Marriott's original 200k award that gave 2 coach tickets worldwide with 2 stopovers, plus two 6-night free stays, was one of the best. And in those days you could actually find award seats and rooms where and when you wanted to go.

Hilton's 100k ALON was great too.

When you revisit this subject 10 years from now, you will want to include today's Southwest Airlines award that has no capacity controls.

Would have been nice if you could use anything other the AirFrance FF miles for this award. Even after DL & AF formed Skyteam, still couldn't use Delta miles for it (and I definitely would have).

Best redemption for me as trip last Sept on Continental using DL Skymiles. Someone on the DL side screwed up the award code, so we were only charged for a US48 ticket, 25k miles. Plus, they had return availability from Maui (plane as only 1/3 full!), which saved us another $75 p/p on interisland tickets to HNL (where most HI availability goes to/from).

Jeff

Yes - especially when you consider the period of time where 4 paid = 1 free. For those whose travel plans match Southwest routes, that is a pretty nice return on investment.

I have a friend who flew MCI-STL on business and always either hawked the certs on eBay or took last-minute getaways to the West Coast. He had those certs coming out of his ears. MCI-STL tickets go for about $100 R/T. MCI-SFO tickets on any airline go for about $250, and that's in the advance purchase fare buckets. He was in a way getting about a 75% rebate on his paid flights.

3 specific awards come to mind from the old (pre-1989) AA chart.
#1 - 50K miles 1 free first class roundtrip ticket Continental US to Hawaii plus 1 first class roundtrip upgrade for travelling companion. I have used this many times, and it includes P class on the 3-class transcons.
#2 - 30K miles for two first class roundtrip upgrades from any fare on any Continental US flight. Again, this is good for P class on the 3-class transcons.
#3-20K miles roundtrip upgrade from any coach ticket to business class on Continental US to Japan flights.

Edited for spelling

[This message has been edited by AAPlatinum (edited Feb 11, 2004).]

KLM Matching Promo in '02

* fly 12000 miles or 20 segments on KL/NW, Flying Dutchman would match your status and the MILEAGE BALANCE of your incumbent mileage account

* Unrelated to the promotion, but coincidentally right on its heels, KL 'converted' its points to align with NW Worldperks miles, so KL points became miles at a 1:1.8 ratio.

* For $1100 in qualifying airfares...
KLM matched my 2.5 million point incumbent program balance and a few months later, converted the KLM points to 4.6 million KLM miles.

* Effective cost per mile- .00025


Unbelievable, unbeatable, unprecedented!!

Two Roundtrip tickets from Washington - Bermuda, zero miles. After Delta announced that it was taking over the Pan Am frequent flier members, we called Pan Am to redeem two tickets to Bermuda. We flew Pan Am and they never debited the miles - the full amount transferred to the Delta program. I guess that was the ultimate thank you from an airline.

Here's an obscure one...

Back around 96 a restaurant chain 'Chart House' offered two round-the-world tickets for a purchase at each of their restaurants. At the time there were 65 of them and the minimum purchase was a $10 gift certificate. The locations were all in the US with 3 in the Caribbean, 5 in Hawaii, about 12 each in New England/northern Atlantic Coast and Florida, about 24 in California, and a run of 'strays' stretching northwest from New Orleans to Portland.

We did a trip to each region and road trip from NO to Seattle to pick up the strays.

Of course there were expenses for the trips but since all but the Caribbean were places we would go anyway I didn't see that as a problem (and the Caribbean turned out to be a great idea as we wound up on Virgin Gorda after our Chart House visits in USVI and Puerto Rico and loved it).

Total invested at Chart house (there were two of us) was a bit over $1300 for four RTW tickets on the airline group of our choice. We used UA to visit the regions (netting my friend PE (I was already top tier)... so we picked UA/LH/TG for the RTW and at that time it was only $1000 to up to business class so we paid the difference to do that. The trip itself netted nice mileage and some Op ugrades to first!

You also got gifts of dinner for 2 and dinner for 6 (two of each since we earned an award each) which included any wine on the list (Dom Perignon and some pretty nice reds). There were other little gifties like Hawaiian shirts, desert coupons, it seems like they were sending us something every week. All in all about $13,000 worth of goodies for $1300 invested.

To this day if someone mentions a place such as Cohasset (Massachusetts), my first comment is 'there's a Chart House there' !

Concorde flight on BA (US award). It was FANTASTIC!!!!!!!!!!