Ok gang, here’s the nutshell. My sister needs to get her husband over from Egypt to my wedding. Finances aren’t the greatest but she has about 30K miles in Northwest miles and 30K in Delta credit card miles. Question is, how does one combine miles? If she is a little short, I’ve heard you can buy miles at about 2.75 per mile. Thanks
You can’t combine miles from Delta and Northwest, as far as I can tell, as they are not partnered with each other in that manner. I believe you can fly Delta and have your miles applied to NWA, but that’s not the same as pooling them. Also, while you can buy miles, the more typical price is around 2-3 cents per mile, not 2.75, and there is a limit on how many you can buy for a given calendar year.
I checked Northwest, and it looks like the absolutely lowest mileage deal they offer from America (I’m assuming that the husband is flying from there) to Egypt is 90,000 miles, and that’s the roundtrip with restrictions. They also seem to limit mileage purchases to 7,500 per year, so that won’t get you close.
It doesn’t look like she’ll be able to use the miles for this trip, but you can always check out this site, as they cover just about everything related to frequent flying, and have a forum where you can ask questions if you can’t find out on your own.
FlyerTalk is another excellent site.
WebFlyer has a mileage converter that shows possible ways to convert miles from one program to another…but NWA and Delta don’t appear to be on their list.
I think that you would need at least 50K miles. Buying 20K miles seems like it would be rather expensive. I dunno if Delta even sells them.
My advice,
Get the Delta Skymiles credit card. Or tell your sister to. Its free for the first year and that gets you 10K miles.
Go to American Express Financial Advisors. You get a couple thousand for just having a consultation and a few more for doing a personal financial plan.
All in all it will cost you some time and maybe a couple of bucks, but it’ll be a damn site less than buying that many miles.
Oh and pray that they have availability. Air France probably has the best availability to North Africa of all the DAL partner airlines and they have a moratorium on award tix until the end of the summer. Depending on when you want to go, you could get lucky or completely shut out. It will take you about six weeks to get all those miles too so that won’t help anyone trying to make advance plans.