<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Shareholder:
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!</font>
They spend about 50 bucks for your meal. Maybe another 50 bucks for incidental costs. Sell the seat for more than $9,000 more than a coach seat, or 80,000 more miles. I don't think they're losing money here.