"Free" tickets with Miles and More

I tried to book a return MAD-TRS flight with LH miles for 15.000 "fly smart" I was shocked to learn that apart of miles LH charge 204 EUR!!!!! for taxes.
So if I choose LX for same flight I pay 158 eur for the whole ticket, without giving away 15.000 miles!!! LH is getting mad. They have earned 1.1 billion euros last year, and are charging full YQ taxes on free tickets!!!! Time to think...

This topic is a old a it can be. At least 1000 threads about this. However, amazing that cheap LX tickets are available at a point in time when they sell FLY SMART. After you followed this board for a while (WELCOME TO FLYERTALK) you will learn that Eco award tickets do only constitute good value on rare occasisions.

Except from super expensive routes (such as BRU-FRA and BRU-ZRH), miles are not worth to be used on Y redemptions.

This is in its generality certainly not correct. Domestic or intra European Four segment flights and flights booked on short notice can constitute amazing value. However, you need to know the programm and need to know what you are doing. And flying BRU-FRA constitutes no value at all - at least to my humble and green opinion.

Sometimes can also be good value in "Open Jaws" or for trips mid week of just 1 night to destinations where there is not much competition.
LWO comes to my mind, but I am sure there are many more.

Indeed. Those money-making Ukraine/Russian/Moldova routes are a good value for FlySmart tickets, even in M, especially when E/L/T fares are gone and W-fare for Ukraine-EU is above 480 EUR.

Rather than start a new thread, I thought I'd use this one to ask a redemption question.

My wife (who has no status) has 15,000 miles set to expire in a month or so. Seems to me she has a few options.
1. let the miles expire.
2. buy something from the Worldshop or FRA duty free. Very poor value (around 50 Euros for her miles) but better than letting them expire. Can I use her card to buy something if I have her pin? has anyone ever done this for a family member w/o status?
3. do a weekend city break somewhere. The places we are considering are around 400-600 Euro for a revenue ticket for the first weekend in June with taxes around 200-250 Euro. I would use my M&M account for my ticket. This, of course, assumes that there will be availability two weeks out, but history suggests that this is probable. We're looking at London, Milan, Paris, Berlin, Istanbul, etc.--someplace with a Hyatt to use up the free nights I got with my credit card. So we would be using her miles plus the cash plus 30,000 of my miles for a short but fun weekend. It's not a great value admittedly (although the tickets are expensive to buy) and when you add in local transport, food and sightseeing, it will set us back 500 Euro minimum.

So, any opinions? is it better to spend 500 Euro and 30,000 miles to "save"/redeem 15,000 miles but get a fun weekend in the process or to use my wife's miles to buy her some perfume at duty free (which she would definitely enjoy). And if you have any suggestion for something I may have missed, let me know.

Welcome to FT, axel.bosch!

LH doesn't claim those tickets are free. Not at all. The only time they do this is with the corporate program where the flights are called "free" and somehow noone has taken them to court of this yet.