Keep your M&M miles in M&M, and use them for a European return at some point... They'll really not do you much good apart from that.


The following does not take into account what shorthauldad rightly points out about FlySmart awards...


Having said that, there's really no reason why you should think of 18k M&Ms as being the same as 18k avios... 9k avios will get you a return from London to the nearer European destinations (as far as MXP, I think, but ISTBC). On M&M you'd need to pay 30k for that return, and fork out a lot more than the standard RFS £40. Notwithstanding the cash differential, this means (for me) that M&M:Avios is roughly 5:3.

Now let's look at it a different way. MAN-SZG. With Avios, you'd need to fly MAN-LON-SZG, doubling the number of required avios (segment-based pricing). With M&M, you'd also need to make one stop (presumably MAN-FRA-SZG, or MAN-ZRH-SZG), but the miles price stays the same (the pricing system is zone-based). So this values M&M's at possibly a higher rate than avios, but the cash part is so high in both cases, that I would never value M&Ms as highly as avios, indeed I think their value is a lot lower...