[dlhall]

For those of you who will be traveling in the next year, don't forget to sign up for any and all travel reward programs that you can ie: frequent flyer miles. We totally missed out on the two trips we took for my dd's adoption; it never even crossed our minds as we are not big travelers normally. For my son's adoption, we signed up with Delta's Skymiles program and earned enough points for 3 round trip tickets in the US; I used them to take the kids to Phoenix in March.

We also signed up for Marriott Rewards program, and I just now remembered we have a lot of points from all our stays in Russia. I'm in the process of trying to book a weekend getaway for my hubby and I. I'm so excited to be able to get away; we're only going to go to a town about an hours drive from us and since our points are covering the cost of the hotel, we're going to stay somewhere fancy (something I'm too cheap to pay for on my own). So as I'm planning my fun weekend away, I thought I'd send out a reminder to sign up for the plans!

Liz

[kretzklan]

I think we are just unlucky...but we had over 120,000 miles on Delta and were never able to use them. The flights we needed were "not covered" by FF miles everytime we called or the flights they could offer us were red eyes or buttcrack early in the morning...not fun with kids. We paid for 3 years to roll them over (they charge $50/year) and then apparently missed a warning letter and they all expired and Delta will not discuss it with us. At all...of course, it's free to sign up - so a great idea...but I would be leary of the paying to keep them after the first period...if you haven't used them, you probably won't!

[dlhall]

I've never had to pay anything for our Delta skymiles except when I transferred my husband's miles to my account, so I had enough miles total to "purchase" the tickets I wanted. It was difficult to redeem the free tickets, and I had to be very flexible with my dates, and I also booked 3 months in advance of the trip I was taking.

Liz

[another2]

As far as I can tell, so long as you are accruing new miles to the account each year, the miles "stay good." It is only when you stop flying for a long period of time that they expire. We also have the Delta Skymiles membership. And we opened a Delta Skymiles American Express account when we travelled. Then we accrued miles for paying for our plane tickets and Marriott hotel stays and, at the same time, received Delta Skymiles from Marriott for staying there and from Delta for flying. We accrued a ton of miles which we used when we got home to visit relatives to show off the new children. Last year my husband took several trips on Delta affiliates and earned Delta miles -- enough to fly 5 of us across country on vacation this summer entirely on miles.

Delta has a new system of letting you use miles and pay. So if a ticket is cheap, you can just use miles. If you are booking last minute or during a busy time and the ticket price is expensive, you can use miles and pay some in cash. Since they have started doing it this way, I have not had trouble getting a ticket unless the plane was completely full. In fact, I booked a ticket this way the day before I needed to fly out to California this spring. A $1500 ticket ended up costing me miles plus $79 -- mostly because it was so last minute. I understand their program is changing again -- or has just done so. I am not sure what changes are being made, but we have had terrific success with them so far...

[papedge]

this is what happend to me with the Delta skymiles. i flew aeroflot a sky alliance partner (contenetal airlines) and delta should of issued me the points but they said contenetal/areoflat had to issue me a membership and give me there miles/points in the end 3 trips to Russia over $10,000.00 in airfair and no miles ever issued at the end they both said after back and fourth for a year its been a year my time to get the miles has expired. Also with all this on my firstr trip my luggage was lost got it back one month after being home.