I moved away from Skymile points about 2 years ago. Delta has devalued them quite a bit and I found that annoying.
Given that fact, I also found that for my trips the hotel is always the biggest expense.
You can get a fairly cheap ticket to alot of places in the world, but an expensive hotel is just about always expensive.
For example, if you go to Italy for 2 weeks and stay in a hotel that is $200 per night that's $2,800. You can probably find 2 tickets to fly over for around $1,000.