Originally posted by swaggie:
GreyOwl...
A Citibank AAdvantage credit card earns 1 mile per dollar charged. If you presume that you would have bought whatever you were buying anyway, using the Citibank card gets you miles at $0.00 cents per mile, and it doesn't get any cheaper than that. (I'm not, of course, amortizing the annual fee, which is immaterial in this context).
Now, about the 1.5-3 cents per mile value of the miles - actually, it all depends on what you are going to use the miles for. I use mine primarily for premium international travel that I would *never* buy a ticket for. Consider a round trip first class ticket from RDU to Sydney on AA/QF. Rough price for this ticket (give or take a few bucks) is $10,000. Mileage required: 135,000. Value of each mile redeemed: 7.4 cents. I do this one twice a year and the value is hard to beat. (Actually, it's an even better value when I redeem US miles in the US program for the same ticket - US/QF - at 125,000 vs 135,000 - value of each US mile redeemed is 8 cents.)
Citibank AAdvantage....totally agree we should all have something like that, but as an insular US corporation, Citibank won't give me one as I am a "non-resident alien" with no SS#...oh well, I'll stick to AMEX Membership Rewards and go to Disneyworld
As for value per mile...
How about a one way transatlantic upgrade...
Couple of weeks back flew on a through fare of US$790 (6 sectors)....call it US$395 each way....upgraded one way for 25,000 miles.....half of a rt Business Class ticket would have been around $3k....so value of US$2,600 for 25,000 miles....over $10c per mile.....
Plus I agree with the sentiment of using miles for stuff you would never spend $$ on, for me that is business class international travel...plus you earn miles while using them...
