We had been charging most of our purchases on the American Express Gold Card and the co-branded American Express/Delta Skymiles for years and had accumulated a significant amount of Membership Rewards points and Delta Skymiles. By the beginning of 2009 we decided to burn up all our miles because Delta was devaluing their Skymiles by charging more for "first class" tickets, so much so that critics were now calling Skymiles "Skypesos." So we made two trips out to Hawaii, one with our daughter in 2009, and then again by ourselves in 2010. We really enjoyed the 2009 trip but the 2010 trip was miserable thanks to Delta's incompetence.

2009: we flew to Honolulu nonstop from Atlanta on Northwest flight 803 on July 24th and returned nonstop from Honolulu to Atlanta on Northwest flight 802 on August 2nd and 3rd, 2009. We flew from Honolulu to Kona on the Big Island on July 24th, from Kona to Honolulu to Kahaluu, Maui on July 26th, then Kahaluu to Honolulu to Lihue, Kauai on July 28th and Lihue to Honolulu on July 30th.

2010, we were supposed to fly on the daily non-stop Delta Air Lines A330 from Atlanta to Honolulu but Delta royally F'd us with their incompetence and inability to successfully run a large hub operation at Atlanta. After such a screw job by Delta we will never fly them again and we have flown hundreds of flights on the great Southwest Airlines since then. The departure out of Miami International Airport was delayed because they just "discovered" when we were pushing back from the gate that there was no "blue fluid" in the toilets. The aircraft had overnighted at Miami and the midnight shift didn't do their jobs, obviously. We still managed to arrive at Atlanta at a decent time despite going way west of the airport to land to the east on the southernmost runway. It took forever and a day to taxi to the terminal from what seemed like Macon, Georgia and then a line of Delta aircraft couldn't proceed westbound on the taxiway for some reason.