The "miles for cash" or "miles to pay for your ticket" are an absolute scam. While I don't remember the exact dollar or mileage amounts, last summer my wife and I were putting together a trip DFW/FRA/FLR/MUC/DFW. The booking was Lufthansa in business class. Quoted fare was in the $20K range for the two of us. AMEX was more than happy to suggest that I buy the tickets and they would use Reward points to pay for them at $.01 per point, meaning burning about 2,000,000 of my AMEX points. Instead I transferred about $250K Amex points to my CO OnePass account and used 10% of the points that AMEX was suggesting