Originally Posted by
thijsseh
To me it seems that the biggest negative change is the removal of mileage keeper awards. So you'll need an insane amount of miles to get an award ticket ...
I dunno,
thijsseh. I thought I would try a dummy booking today just to see what kind of burn rates apply under the new rules. I checked a random date in November for a one-way** award for 2 pax in J travelling JNB-HKG.
Oh how I laughed when the answer came up: over 475k miles*! Of course we must take into account that that includes taxes. (At least I think that's what I read - it's pretty academic as far as I am concerned. Using US Dividend miles, for 110k I can do CPT/JNB/HKG/NRT and still be on the same flight!)
Bye-bye Voyager!! It's been an "interesting" couple of decades...
* Earning this would require spending more than R750k on SA tickets and would as promised return roughly 5% to you.
** Because it is pricing actual tickets this makes one-way awards just as bad value as one-way paid tickets.