I agree with Davistev that 500 K is a pretty decent deal. I am 1K with UA, but a UA ticket can only get me to a few locations in Europe. I am looking forward to having the flexibility of adding other flights on award tickets to take me to places farther along than my paid mileage tickets.
As always with a mileage run there is a risk factor that all the conditions won't be met. I lost 100,000 miles on the 1999 One World promo because one of my tickets was in the wrong booking class, but I still fared quite well.
I spent an extra $500 and burned 30,000 AA miles for the LatinPass million mile bonus because a counter agent in Guatemala took my entire boarding pass and I didn't have any flight receipt causing me to take a third trip to Latin America just to pick up a boarding pass. Total trip cost was $4,500. I have redeemed well over $10,000 in Hilton hotel rooms so far with about another 100 nights of hotel rooms left to use.
I am doing this 55,555 trip in two segments. I just got back from Leg 1 today. My wife and I spent $1,200 for a weekend in Canada, including airfare, hotels, and all and 4 AC segments and 5 UA segments. (Love that Gate 38 Maple Lounge at YVR
, but what is up with those rude YVR immigration agents
) We received VDB (Voluntary Denied Boarding) awards twice, (Ms. Satori threatened to kill me if I took the third VDB award last night), and recouped $1,200 in UA vouchers and 2 domestic ticket vouchers ((accrue miles)) + hotels and meal vouchers. We got home 3 hours after our originally planned return time.
In two weeks we start on our annual European summer trip. We altered five days to get three *alliance carriers. We will have a night in Ireland and two nights in Budapest. Assuming all goes as planned, we will accumulate 500,000 miles, I will get a free 50 K status miles on the VDB awards, and within the next two years I will turn the 55,555 miles in 4 programs into 8 business or first class transatlantic tickets through hotel, credit card, and other mileage transfers.
I consider this a great investment of $2,000 for airfare. Since Ms. Satori refused to take the LatinPass run I consider this the best run we've seen in the past two years.