Originally Posted by
Gongzuokuang
I completed same survey.
Pay with points? I really struggle to see how it would EVER make sense to pay with points through Amex Travel.
Let's compare to an awful program, like Delta. To fly Business Class to Hong Kong is easily $6000 or more. If you want to use SkyPesos, and are lucky enough to grab the one single "saver" seat they offer per year, it's maybe not a bad deal. But generally it's 240K - 320K for a business class seat.
That values the points at $0.025 each on the lower redemption, and and $0.0188 on the higher. I'd never accept that.
Under the hypothetically improved Pay with Points, you'd need anywhere from 429,000 to over 501,000 points. This is just crazy.
Of course, I look at it through the lens of International Long Haul in Business Class.
It depends what market you are looking at. For example, you can often find pretty reasonably priced business class fares to Europe in the summer (when business travelers aren't filling those seats), often under $3000 roundtrip and sometimes even less than that.
I agree that for "normal" business class fares this isn't a good deal, but it may not be terrible, and for some booking profiles it may be very good -- those $3000 business class fare deals often arise at a point in the year when the low price award tickets are long since sold out. You would also earn miles on these tickets, unlike a real award ticket, which has some value.