Originally Posted by
respectable_man
The correct logic is that miles are worthless unless you use them. Sitting on a 100k's miles and waiting so you can finesse the system is essentially pointless unless you are willing to travel when and where the airlines want you to.
"Free" travel on miles will soon be a thing of the past; the value of the FFPs will be in getting status so you don't have to pay the silly fees that are now tacked on everything from luggage to seat selection to soda cans.
This isn't quite true. The advantage of accumulating 100k's of miles is to be able to use them for premium class international seats. For instance, for about 480,000 miles, I'm taking my family of 3 from NY to Thailand next year in first class (on United - not the best first class, but orders of magnitude better than spending $3500+ for coach). The value of these tickets if I had to buy them is at least $30,000 - which means the value of the 480,000 miles I spent was at least 6.25 cents per mile (although I had to pay $75 in booking fees and around $100 in taxes). The vast majority of these miles were earned by traveling for work or by using my United-branded credit card (so Chase paid for much of my trip, even though I have yet to pay them a penny in interest or any other sort of fee) - so most of these miles were truly "free" in the sense that I didn't pay out-of-pocket for the tickets or services that earned them.
Of course, UA has raised its redemption rates (especially for "standard awards", which have no capacity controls; one of the 3 tickets the Thailand was a standard award), so the value for redemptions next year will indeed be less than this year. But if you value premium class international travel at retail rates, the value per mile still works out to much more than the ~2 cents per mile mentioned in the WSJ article. And the air travel expenses for such a trip work out to pretty close to "free."