Ask Randy

Randy Petersen answers reader questions about how to maximize travel-related loyalty programs.

Dear Randy,I have a friend who is going through a divorce. Her husband has 300,000–400,000 frequent flyer miles. She doesn’t fly and doesn’t want the miles, but needs to put a value on them in order to get half of their value. I thought that you could actually buy frequent flyer miles from the airlines, but on checking Delta’s Web site, I couldn’t find anything.

Ah, yes…the old divorce and miles question. First of all, there’s the question of whether miles can be considered community property or not for divorce proceedings. If you were to read the fine print of the United Mileage Plus program, for example, you’d see specific wording that miles in that program cannot be part of any “domestic dispute,” meaning divorce.

As for the topic of valuation, there’s no real answer there either. Programs do sell miles to individual program members, allowing them to “top off” their mileage balances for award redemption purposes, and Delta sells miles to both individual members and businesses, but it would be highly unfair to use that price as a yardstick, since there is a matter of margin. That price (just by way of clarification) is nearly three cents per mile. For divorce and estate purposes, my court testimony has been that if there must be some sort of valuation, they should probably be considered at less than one cent per mile.

In close to all cases of divorce, miles and points are usually not included in the settlement—the valuation process is too subjective and inconclusive, and many couples simply opt not to argue about it. But for the divorces in which they are included, there’s often a real fight for them.

Ask Randy.

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RANDY PETERSEN is publisher of Inside Flyer magazine and is president of Frequent Flyer Services. Email Randy at editor@executivetravelmag.com.