Dear Randy,

I am finding more and more that these loyalty programs aren't worth a flip. Especially at the hotels. I work for a major U.S. air express transportation corporation. While our company has contracts with sometimes deeper discounted hotel rooms all over, the hotels won't generally give us any hotel points or airline miles. Their common theme answer is, "Your company is paying for your room, sir." I ask you in great frustration: Why should it matter or make any sense exactly who pays for my room?

Sorry to hear about your troubles. I think I see what the problem might be. When you say that the program won't give you points or miles very often, my guess is that it is based on the way your travel was booked. When you note that the front desk replies, "Your company is paying for your room, sir," that indicates you might be on Master Billing or Direct Billing. In these two situations, it is very common for individual travelers not to receive points or miles based on their stay. And while I can't speak for the hotel programs themselves, I think this might be the reasoning: The company is making the travel decision, and companies can't be members of hotel loyalty programs.

There is one other possibility, which is that hotel programs often exclude "industry rates" from qualifying for points or miles. It just might be that since you work for a major air express corporation, your company has a contract with the hotel group for an "industry rate," and thus your stays are exempt from the program.

You might be asking: If these programs are based on revenue spent anyway, what's the deal? Low rates just mean you've got to be more of a frequent guest to get the same rewards as other, higher-paying members.

I can understand that, but if the hotel is already giving a steep discount to some corporations so that those corporations can save money, it makes little sense to then add back in the cost of rewards, something corporate accounts don't share in.

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.