Lame Airline Mile Awards: Is This Really the Best You Can Do?

We had miles expiring on several different airlines.

Small amounts of miles worth only the free magazine subscriptions. And to a nasty little selection of magazines at that.

So we now have subscriptions to:

• RADAR
• The Atlantic Monthly
• Wired
• The Economist
• Backpacker
• W
• Forbes
• Sports Illustrated
• The Advocate
• Variety
• The Wall Street Journal
• Working Mother
• Fortune
• Conde Nast Traveler

Magazines we would read, but couldn't get: Newsweek; Consumer Reports; The New Yorker; and Mother Jones.

Do we have any cash to travel right now? No.

Do we have kids? No.

Are we gay? No.

Do we care about Hollywood? No.

Do we have any investments? Not really.

Do we watch sports? Only the Olympics.

Do I buy designer clothes? No.

We don't really want most of these. I would rather have a free sweatshirt, or a travel mug, or even a dog pillow (airline logo ok). But I can't get any of those things.

So instead we've just tripled the load to the recycling bin each week...

Think about how much more of a win-win it would be for the airline to let me burn these off in the "your airline logo on stuff" section of the SkyMall. They will (I have the logo in my house, after all, for a lot longer than a copy of the WSJ will be kept), I win, the enviornment wins, we all win.

Well, everyone wins except for the department of the magazine that calculates distribution for the ad sales, they would loose. But I really don't care about those guys. They should get with the times and get a job in web analytics instead.