Several years ago after continuous travel with a former airline, we signed up for dividend miles thinking that someday we would be able to fly down on their dime. Lately my wife has started receiving e-mails notifying her that she would have to use them by October or buy more miles to keep the account open. So I started the process of looking online to see how to go about this. Wow! is all I can say. I don't know how the rest of you are able to use them but boy are there restrictions and stupidity involved. I looked at my "flexible dates" first and found that I could use a low # of miles but that the flight would leave at 8 in the morning out of Detroit and arrive an hour later in Chicago. I would then get to wait at the airport until 10 that night where I would fly to Philadelphia and spend the entire evening. In the morning I would finally fly direct to SXM. The flight home was not any better. I would leave SXM at 10 in the morning and fly to Miami and then onto Phoenix and finally home to Detroit. Makes a lot of sense to me to fly west when I live north doesn't it? So I plugged in my exact dates that I wanted (which by the way was only a day or two from their lowest mile chart and early in the week by the way) and found that to use what I had in my account which was 33,000 miles, I would need an additional 31,000. The cost of buying more miles would be $927.57. Pretty darn good math if you ask me. I use all my dividend miles which I have been saving for years, then pay them $927. What is so incredible to me is that the regular ticket price is $712 per ticket. (if you recall I ranted about this a month ago since I could not figure out how with fuel prices lower than ever, ticket prices were still through the roof.) Where were any savings for us the consumer? So my conclusion is that dividend miles are a fictitious illusion created by the airlines pretending to give you something in return for your loyal patronage, but screwing you over in the end process. The airline I am referring to is at the beginning of the alphabet by the way. Forgot to mention that to share your miles with your spouse is not free either. There is a huge fee associated with sharing even though you paid for them in the first place. Great eh? <img src="http://www.traveltalkonline.com/forums/images/graemlins/Clapping.gif" alt="" />
