CC Travel Blog

I’m completely amazed by the US airlines mileage system. Beyond amazement, there are also the emotions of stress, redicule, frustation and helplessness.

I have about 32,000 miles on my Delta Airline account that are about to expire by the end of May. So I thought that it could well worth a domestic ticket as most of the mileage credit card promotion flyers advertise 25,000 miles for a domestic trip. So I thought!

I looked up Delta’s mileage reward chart, to my surprise, instead of one price per route, now they’re expanding it to a maze, with low, medium and high range of miles that expand from 12,500 to 30,000 for a “coach.” I should still be OK, I told myself; so I clicked “use miles.”

Then, from any locations I picked varying from the closest west coast such as Seattle to the furtherest corner of Maine, it cost anywhere from 32,500 miles to 40,000 miles. Suddenly I dropped out from the sufficient miles status to lacking miles. I could buy miles to fill up the gap and worst case, I spent a bit over 100 bucks to get the ticket and used up my miles.

Besides redeeming a ticket, I ran out of choices. I could probably use miles for magazines, which is the only alternative under the SkyMiles program for me. Each magazine costs from 400 miles to 3300 miles, how many magazines do I have to read to use up my miles, I wondered?! There is also a “Medallion® Marketplace” that offers exchange for gift cards and other stuff. But magically I was not eligible in that program.

So far I was bummed thice but at least my maximum damage was only 100 dollars, while my husband was dealing with a 9 level higher monster with Northwest.

First of all, all his flights require 50,000 to 60,000 miles, which means he has to spend over 600 dollars to buy enough miles to redeem a ticket that is selling for 550 dollars. He was also eligible for the miles for magazine problem, which cheered him up for a moment that he could get Wall Street Journal for about 3,000 miles until I reminded him that he needed to get 10 of the paper use up the miles. Fortunately for him, he could exchange stuff with his miles, for example, a $35 dollar Target bubble foot spa would cost him 12,000 miles and a less than $10 umbrella would cost another 11,000 miles. Self-assigned with another task, he started to write down a list of things he could choose to maximize his mileage. And then as I was checking out his screen, I pointed out that it was a bidding system, not a market place where you pick and check out! A swirl of mess is the perfect description of the lousy Northwest WorldPerks.

We spent almost three hours on our desktop browsing and figuring out this completely irrational and unusable mileage redemption system and laughed helplessly until tears started to squeeze our of our dry eyes. As I recall, one travel expert said that accumulating miles are not for the free ticket redemption but for the status upgrade. If only we could stick with one account!

So the lesson is, stop jumping around for airlines that is a few bucks cheaper but to stay using one account. This lesson cost us one international round trip, worth anywhere from 1,000 dollars to 1,300. Costly!