Originally Posted by pbarnette

My point was that you described the miles as "one of the few benefits" you received for traveling. I would think that it should be incumbent upon your employer to compensate you for the disutility of frequent travel, not Delta. But your answer here suggests that you receive more than a few benefits for your travel (e.g. work fulfillment, comfortable work environment).



I was working off of your DTW-LAX example, which should earn around 8k miles under today's rules. I estimated a 35% haircut for the new earnings, which translates to 2,771 fewer miles with DL vs AA. I multiplied that by a penny, giving $27.71 for the roundtrip. Depending upon layovers, you are likely looking at 3 to 4 hours of additional travel time, so you would be pricing your time at less than $10 per hour. Ask yourself whether you would spend 3 to 4 hours mowing lawns each week rather than traveling, because you could make your money that way.

Now, you seem to have a slightly higher value per mile, but I also seem to be understating the cost of a ticket, which seems to be roughly $350 each way for a Monday-out/Friday-back flight between DTW and LAX. Using $350 and assuming you are a PM, plus your $300 example, that would put the value of the extra miles at less than $20 per week. Assuming you redeemed for $500 tickets, that would put the value of the extra miles at around $32 per week. Redeeming primarily for long-haul business class would potentially see the value jump to around $50 per week, but that is probably a bit of a false value if you would never spend $4k+ for a long-haul J ticket.