Well, you have to choose. Whether you want to fly a different airline, or pay more to fly DL.

With your NW miles, you can spend them now one way or another, or just wait until the merger so you can merge your miles.

CO will leave Skyteam and join Star. If that's who you want to fly, that's great, but you will have to connect for many of your flights, and your incidental DL flights won't earn you any CO miles then.

In the end, you have to look at your travel needs and preference and decide what's best for you.

DL/NW have eliminated fuel surcharges on US/Canada originating award tickets.

There's currently a 30% transfer bonus from Membership Rewards to DL through Dec 31, 2008 http://tinyurl.com/5942sr

Unlike some of the previous transfer bonuses, this one posts very quickly. 1 week according to the T&C, but mine posted within 1 hour (the transferred points posted instantly and the 30% bonus showed up less than an hour later).

Depending on how many points you need to transfer, it may actually cost less miles to redeem with DL.

Thanks Patty! Did AmEx e-mail that offer to you or Delta?

I can't remember if I received an email from Delta or Amex or not, but the offer isn't targeted. It's also mentioned on the Membership Rewards website.

When will Delta combine ff miles with NWA?

Patty thanks for posting that!

<i>During early 2009, I anticipate that we will announce and launch full mileage pooling between customer accounts, that will allow you all to move miles back and forth between your NW and DL accounts.</i>

According to Jeff Robertson http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=888336

guys, thanks for this heads up. I was able to transfer points to use for a flight to CA... saving us a BUNCH of money.

The 30% bonus showed up about 12 hours after I transferred.

(I crossposted this on the Lounge since more may see it there)

The 30% bonus miles is valid until 12/31 which I'll link at the bottom. I transferred about 90K AMEX points over a week ago and received an extra 27K sky mile points. It took less than 30 min for points to transfer + extra 30% so I was very happy.

http://www.delta.com/skymiles/ways_t...line/index.jsp