Originally Posted by
MDtR-Chicago
My travel patterns are similar to yours. I consistently set a threshold of 1.5 cpm myself. Occasionally I can do better but that number helps me to avoid overpaying for the miles.
You might want to consider diversifying. Traditional programs are great for the long flights. But there are other programs that do much better for short. As an example, Avios costs as low as 9000 miles for the shortest roundtrips (SFO-LAX-SFO, for example). Also, each Southwest point is worth roughly 1.7 cents in cash value toward advance purchase fares. So there are frequently great redemption values on cheap flights.
To put it in perspective, on the shortest/cheapest flights, 50k miles or points in each program could be commonly used as
2.5 roundtrips on UA
8 roundtrips on Southwest
11 roundtrips on Avios
In general, they are not equally easy to acquire, although there are frequent 50k+ credit card signup offers in each program.
Yeah I agree, UR points can go into any of those three which is why so far this spending has stayed there. If there was something more valuable I would like to capitalize on it, but I guess this is to unique of a spend to get any additional bonus.
I'm still young so my spending power is not very high, but I'm trying to make up for it by maxing my spends return.
I may do more applications later but I've mostly just applied for cards I want to add. I've added both Sapphire pref, freedom both in the last ~9 months, and extremely happy with the two cards, got great bonuses and earning valuable points fast.