AA miles value is a fuzzy thing.

For example, we got two J tickets West Coast to MAD stopover and then to IST. Retail around $9K each. We paid $81 each in taxes and fees.

At retail, one possible value of our 90K miles was ten cents each. But, when we wanted to change our return date it was impossible. If we had had paid tickets I am sure it would have been easily done because we would not have had to get into what seats had been released to the AA program by Iberia, etc. and which involved calls to London from IST (at our expense) to get the AA desk. And our connections were not great. When we did change our return routing to get a somewhat better connection (after many, many calls to AA in Spain and to London from IST--did you know that the AA # in Spain is a special, not-toll free number which is quite costly to call?) we had to pay $150 each for some sort of fee.

So, I might estimate the actual value we got out of the 90K miles as being around 6-7 cents each--although it was quite irksome to be trapped in IST when we wanted to get to the US.

Still, all in all, a pretty good deal. Wonder if we will be able to get seats to Europe in J or F next Summer?