I was short 1321 miles to get the FF ticket I was holding for 48 hours. I was scheduled to be getting over 2000 at the end of my next billing cycle for my American Express card in mid- Sept.

I called customer service and asked if anything could be done. A lovely young lady named Amber, spoke to her supervisor and arranged for the miles to be transferred today so that I could redeem that ticket before it expired.

All I had to do was ask.

Debi

If I understand you correctly, you're transferring AMEX Membership Rewards points, right?

If so, it has nothing to do with DL. I "borrowed" a couple thousand of AMEX MR points to my CO account earlier this year too.

It's just a perk of the AMEX program... Well, that's what the annual fees bring, I guess.

These are miles that I get with American Express Sky Miles Delta Credit Card. They are miles, not membership rewards.

I see. Good to know!

I'm just curious how this worked since the miles come from Amex. I wonder how they got Amex to advance the miles to you or did Delta simply give you the miles.

I had a similar situation (waiting for miles to post and needing to redeem an award) and they allowed my account to have a negative balance knowing that miles were forthcoming.

However, they did it, good for you!

Getting a bit off topic, I've also had very good customer service from Membership Rewards. On one occasion I was a few hundred points short and they just gave them to me. Recently, I used the Points Advance feature to borrow points and transfer them to Delta. Well, I kind of goofed and to make a long story short, they couldn't figure out how to fix it so they ended up giving me 15000 points!

I think they were able to see my Amex balance [with miles] to be posted in a few weeks. Not sure how they did it, but they are there now. Maybe they will take them back after the end of the billing cycle.

I really didn't think there was going to be much if anything they could or would do, so what ever magic they did - I am glad.

Debi

Good for you and great DL CS.

About 2-3 years ago, I put a complicated OneWorld award (took about an hour on the phone with AA agent) that "cost" 180K miles. Unfortunately I only had about 178,200 miles in the bank at the time. Fortunately AA allows a 2 week hold for award bookings. I thought about it for the 2 weeks and decided that I did want to take this trip, but I was still short about 1800 miles. I called AA and ask about my options. At first I was offered to purchase 2000K miles, and I would have done it if I had to but the agent started to look at my history with AA. She saw that each year I earn at the very least 200K miles (100K miles flown plus status bonus) and she changed her story. She booked the ticket, put my account into negative 1800 miles and wished me a great trip.

I believe that if you have solid history with an airline they will give you a "loan" so to speak. If you earned 24K miles in 3 years and want to take out a 25K miles award then it may be a different story.