Diners Club Club Rewards - Diners to AA: Gift card or miles

I know someone out there has already done the math...

Generally speaking, would it be better to hold AA gift cards or AA miles?

I plan to fly the family (4 tickets) to disney next year and am wondering if I would do better booking it via points or paying for it via gift cards...

I'm not opposed to paying out of pocket in advance for some cheap coach fares, which is why I'm thinking the gift card route may be best...

But if I can grab 4 tickets at 25k each (12,500 each way mileage saver), I'd think that's a good deal also...

thoughts?

Most of the people on FT don't recommend using points/miles on vacations to locations that can easily be reached with a cheap ticket but if you decide to use the DC points for that purpose I would keep the following in mind:

1. You might have a hard time getting 4 award tickets on the same flight.
2. You will have to pay taxes and other fees on the 4 award tickets if you use points.
3. Unless I am totally confused, you will get FF points for the tickets if you use gift cards to pay for them.
4. How expensive the actual tickets would be if you booked them.

Basically it breaks down to award availability and what the actual cost of the ticket would be if you bought them. If the tickets are less than $250 per ticket it would seem that the gift cards might be a better option. I personally would book a SWA direct flight (instead of changing plans on AA with four people) and pay for it. Since I am not sure on which days you would like to travel I checked random dates in May and SWA has one way fares for approx. $84 which would get you in at less than $200RT.

Great, Thanks for the advice. Hitting SW didn't even register with me as I was focusing on using Diners points to draw-down some of my balance and take the family somewhere...but that certainly makes sense. Especially the part about the non-stop flight! @:-) ^

Hitting SW didn't even register with me as I was focusing on using Diners points to draw-down some of my balance

You could, of course, redeem Diners Club points for Rapid Rewards credits...

Item Name Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards®
Item Number 0940f
Points 1,500
Description 1,500 points = 1 Rapids Reward credit

https://www.citibank.com/dinersus/jsp/clubrewards/catalog/english/certificate_list.jsp?category=c50a9ad0&subcategory=fc79feb6

The AA gift card is 1 cent per point, flat out, and you earn the miles back on the trip, so maybe 1 cent per point and a little more from the earned miles.

If you can eke out a better return than that converting to miles, use the miles.