Originally Posted by
Carolina2Cali
Thx Orca -- so any amount of reward mileage or payment used typically results in the entire flight being rewardless?? It WOULD maybe be best to book rewards one way then and pay the leg back but... why on earth a 1 way flight costs the same as a round trip, reward mileage, is beyond me!
Pay With Miles is typically seen as a pretty bad return on the value of the miles. Your rate of return is only $0.01/mile ($100 off for 10,000 miles), and as Orca15 pointed out, once you use any amount of "Pay With Miles", you no longer accumulate any miles for the flight. Booking two one-ways is using pay with miles is an option for only one of the legs so you'd be able to at least get the mileage one-way.
Sort of related - Unfortunately Delta doesn't have one-way awards so that likely isn't an option unless you could somehow find a "low" award for 25K, which would be slightly less than half of the 60K r/t, so slightly better than 30K miles out and 30K back, if you look at it that way, but you'd still be buying a return ticket.