Originally Posted by
jamienbaker
Sometimes more than ten cents! I routinely redeem 67,500 AA points for one way First awards from USA to Bali on Cathay. So that's less than the aforementioned two free nights (once adjusted for SPG-->AA bonus).
It doesn't need to be an either/or. AA miles aren't scarce for a lot of people. And if you can generate large numbers of SPG points through cc spend (payusatax is only 1.88% fee now), refusing to spend them on anything but CX F might seem a little stubborn.
And I'm guessing you're not getting $.10 of
value out of your points when redeeming for CX F... unless you'd be willing to pay over $10k for that roundtrip, in which case you can probably generate the requisite starpoints quite quickly.