Do you value your Skymiles above 1 cent/mile (CPM)
I am sitting on 500K skymiles and with the rumoured changes coming, I am fearing that if they go to a revenue system that they may value skymiles around the 1 cent mark.
Getting frustrated with lack of availability on partner Air France for awards to Europe. Have not been able to find anything on Delta to Europe.
I was looking on CC and seeing trades Delta-UA at 4:3 ratio. I thought many value UA miles around 1.3 ish range so that would put Delta at 1 CPM?
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Seoul w/ stop over in Tokyo business class on Delta and Korean air for two @ 120,000 miles so I value SkyMiles @ 3-4 cents per mile. Status helps dramatically.
Domestic travel is a bad value. Air France is a bad value (and a bad flight).
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Those of us who know how to use SkyMiles tend to value them higher than those who just read the half-clued blog posts that seem to predominate lately. My upcoming OMA-WLG//HKG-OMA open jaw would cost about $1900 in Y or $7000 in J. (And that's just taking cheapest carriers, even if flights are horrendously inconvenient. I actually got pretty good flights on the award.) It cost me 135K miles plus ~$125 in cash to fly J the whole way (including OMA-MSP-LAX and ATL-OMA).
I don't get too into the cpm game, since while I could afford to take the trip in paid Y, I wouldn't do it because of how awful the flights would be. Paid J is certainly not in the cards. Instead, I look at it and say that I get to fly in style to visit a country I've long wanted to visit. The fact that I can do that while paying almost nothing for the flights means that the miles are awfully valuable in my book.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mtkeller
I don't get too into the cpm game, since while I could afford to take the trip in paid Y, I wouldn't do it because of how awful the flights would be. Paid J is certainly not in the cards. Instead, I look at it and say that I get to fly in style to visit a country I've long wanted to visit. The fact that I can do that while paying almost nothing for the flights means that the miles are awfully valuable in my book.
"Paper" CPM can easily get ridiculous. It's not like I was ever going to drop the ~$14k per ticket price that my vacation with my wife to PAR/RUN(which was a fantastic destination)/MRU earlier this year, and even the $2-3k for coach tickets is a bit more than I'd want to spend (on top of being an itinerary I'd not want to do in the back).
A lot depends on your origin and/or if you're OK with buying positioning flights (some markets just don't have low availability, period) but getting in excess of 1 cent of real value should not be too difficult. I tend to consider redemptions of only 2+ cents per mile, but on the acquisition side I'll typically pay more like 1.1 to 1.3. Absent special cases like buying miles on a promotion to redeem for a specific mediocre redemption (i.e. last christmas I purchased miles to send my sister to mexico with her BF. if it were my wife and I we would have purchased the tickets), I'm targeting international J awards.
There's a higher knowledge-barrier to using Skymiles than there is to using some of the other currencies, and F isn't an option, but for J redemption to a lot of places Skyteam and Delta partners are more than adequate. Skymiles get a bad wrap, but I find them to be attractive for most destinations that interest me.
If you "value" your SM at (as some have said) at 4+ cpm because a 100K SM ticket would cost $4K+ I have a question for you: if low wasn't available would you then buy the ticket rather than spend 150-200K SM? If not, then I don't think you really value you them that much.
A fairer way is to figure out where you would switch from cash to miles when buying a ticket for somebody else (removes the opportunity cost of the lost MQMS if you were flying)
A while back I had to buy a ticket for She Who Must Be Obeyed. It was either $900 or 75K SM. I went with the award ticket. A year or so before the same choice was $550 or 75K and I bought the ticket (I didn't have DL Amex then so Pay With Miles wasn't an option). So I'd say my minimum was around 1.2 cpm. Since She doesn't worry much about SM, She was indifferent to which I chose.
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I don't get too into the cpm game, since while I could afford to take the trip in paid Y, I wouldn't do it because of how awful the flights would be. Paid J is certainly not in the cards. Instead, I look at it and say that I get to fly in style to visit a country I've long wanted to visit. The fact that I can do that while paying almost nothing for the flights means that the miles are awfully valuable in my book.
Great post and info. Cents per mile is not relevant vs. the "sticker price" of an international business class ticket, but vs. what I would have otherwise paid. Another poster once said he would pay about a 50% surcharge over the coach fare for a business class ticket. That might be a reasonable "value." I also like Mad Brewer's viewpoint on this.
For me, I would pay cash for a ticket if I could not get at least 1.5 cents or 2 cents per mile value from the miles. With the tips and tricks available with DL miles that are not available with US/AA/UA, I value DL miles about the same as other miles. The stopover/open jaw rule with DL miles is huge compared with other programs.
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It also depends on how many miles you have. Once I get above 300k miles in the bank, 1 CPM is my threshold to decide if I use cash or miles, for short flights that don't impact my MQM much (have you priced DTW-MSP lately? ).
I love to use miles for J awards internationally (when I can find them!) but I don't use CPM there because I would NEVER pay for a J ticket myself.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by smilee
Thanks, from reading the blogs, CC and threads like changes to Skymiles I was really getting worried.
Even though I have been a long time lurker, I think I need help booking an award, can anyone recommend a booking service?
If you were using miles other than DL, I think any number of the award bookers could help you out. However, given that some of the most prominent ones have recently been posting total nonsense about SkyTeam and using SkyMiles, I don't think I can recommend any of them. There's a lot of great information in this forum (mnredfox's thread on booking partner awards and some of the info in the sticky on low tier business awards are the starting points), and in between griping about DL, we can be a pretty helpful bunch around here. I'd say at least give it a few hours of work before you try a booking service, as they're really proving that they are clueless on SkyMiles lately.
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