Originally Posted by
rankourabu
The 15 cent valuation is not real tho... while yes - thats what the flights retail for, but noone would ever spend $15k on a ticket
You can say, oh yeah, I got a ticket on AC to Europe for 90000 miles and $1000 in scamcharges - and retail was $8000, so you got ~8cpm... but really... you'd never pay 8k for an AC business ticket in full J when you can buy discounted Z for 1/3 that... so your real value would really just be <3cpm.
In addition, the J ticket would be much more flexible than the Aeroplan reward. The difference is difficult to price.
Whenever a Z fare is available, it would be a better reference point. Or latitude+upgrade. But then one nreeds to assign a value for the eUpgrade credits.
The other thing, one needs to account for miles collected on revenue tickets, which are not collected on rewards.
With SE status, and the now very restricted IKK, I normally would never value my miles at more than 2 cents. But I recently redeemed an award with little scam charges, which made it worth it buying extra miles at 3 cents/mile. And whenever I accumulate more than half the miles for the next reward, I'll buy more miles.
However, that is a bit of an exceptional situation. Normally I redeem for my while when traveling together. Which normally means flying AC, hence large scamcharges with a big effet con valuation.
And without status, I would argue value would drop to about 0.8 to 1 cent/mile depending upon the redemption patterns.