Ask Randy

— -- These are tumultuous times for frequent fliers, as struggling airlines continue to add new fees and restrictions to their loyalty programs. So we've invited frequent-flier expert Randy Petersen to take your queries and offer advice on how to make the most of your miles. Here are some recent queries; join him in his ongoing forum to post one of your own or help answer a question from a fellow reader.

Reader TomSLC: I recently tried to book a flight to Shanghai, using Delta miles. The days I picked were listed as LOW on their calendar, which would mean 60,000 miles. But when I went to the next screen, it said the lowest award was 90,000 miles. The same happened on Northwest's website. I called Delta. They informed me that the LOW means that at least one of the segments is available at the LOW rate. This makes their calendars useless for trying to find entire trips at a given reward level. This seems to be a new problem. Any word on whether they are aware of this, working on this, care about this?

Randy Petersen:A really good question and one that I just happened to have done some research on. They are aware of this problem and are working on it. Their challenge is that the priority is the in-house conversion of the two WorldPerks and SkyMiles databases for the merger in 2009. This problem is often related to partner inventory which is unfortunately not always in real-time and thus the problem. I've seen this pop up on other programs calendars as well and for whatever reason, after several tries the glitches went away and the member was able to book. It may not have worked for you but always a suggestion. What I think you are on to here is that because a member can mix and match their award redemption between the LOW and HIGH and now the MIDDLE (!) it creates a wonderful (not!) mirage of challenges.

I wish I could tell you that their system was just having a bad day, but it is going to be a few more bad days before that particular problem is fixed, though as I have said, they are working on it and actually do care since the award system is among the core benefits that they are trying to promote for the new combined program.