Using miles for things other than travel

Can you use Alaska Airlines miles for things other than travel? Transfer to hotels? Merchandise?
My US Air Debit card is going away and now my only other choice is an Alaska Air debit card. I'm wondering what I'd do with the miles earned if I don't fly Alaska.

 

Fly one of Alaska's partners such as AA or Delta or BA or ...?

Or if you don't acquire enough miles for airline tickets, have a look at http://www.alaskaair.com/content/mi...iles-overview.aspx?lid=nav:mileagePlan-redeem -- I think Magazines may be your only other option.

The question, though, is: why use a debit card in the first place?

 

That is a good question. There are some times that I want to use my debit card - for example, my land lord will accept my debit card, but not a credit card. No clue why or what the difference is to him, but that's a lot of money to lose miles on.

 

At Delta, you can use miles for things like rental cars -- I recently used about 8k miles to rent a car that would have cost at least 150 for one day.

DTWBOB

 

Do yourself a favor and stop using debit cards. They have nearly none of the consumer protections credit cards do, and they expose your checking account to a higher potential for fraud.

Get a single credit card, use it, and pay it off every month from your checking account. Same math, better protection... and better choices.

 

Good question! Mine is similar- can I transfer Alaska airlines miles to American Airlines miles?

 

This is actually a great option! Thanks.

 

I recently actually used that myself. I have some 27k Alaska miles that have been sitting around forever, and I keep them alive for that future flight that never seems to come. So instead of adding a few miles via car rental this year to keep the account going, I canceled a magazine subscription and re-subscribed via miles.

 

Perhaps via points.com, but it would most likely be a bad value propposition. But AA is an award redemption partner of Alaska, so if you don't have a need to actually combine the miles for a larger balance, that might be your way to use them on AA.