Just redeemed 140K AAdvantage miles for a CX ticket between YYZ and JNB in First Class. 28,000 miles of travel. Figure the retail cost of such a ticket is around $10K, so that's 7-cents a mile. Spent about $3K on two vacation trips (Mileage Runs) and three business trips to earn this mileage, along with some credit card charges. That works out to be about 2-cents a mile. So I spent 2-cents, got that travel plus another 7-cents worth in return. No wonder the airline business is losing billions a year!