Originally Posted by
DaveInLA
But just because I redeemed 60K miles for a $6K flight itinerary doesn't mean I got 10 cpp. After all, it took a lot of work to find that flight and I had to be flexible and work my schedule around the available dates for that award. I would've never paid $6K cash for that flight. Now if I could book that flight ANYTIME, that would be different. But that's just not the case.
Sure it is available anytime. At several legacy airlines, if you're flying the airline's own metal, you can redeem about double the miles for "anytime" awards. So in this example, 120k miles for $6k flight may be bookable anytime, so by your logic that is 5 cpp, which is still way more than 2.1 cpp.
But your fallacy is that not everyone's time spend figuring out award booking is costing them money. If it comes purely out of their own time, it may only cost TV watching, or golfing time, or whatever. But I don't see why you devalue UR for that.
I think a reasonable valuation might be what it would cost in the next class down (which on many airlines today is premium economy, not ordinary coach), if that's what you might consider buying if you couldn't use miles. And that is still likely to yield a bit more than 2.1 cpp, isn't it?
At any rate, if you feel that the value of a 60k redemption is "priceless", and you wouldn't have taken the trip at all if you hadn't had the miles/points, then you can't establish exact cpp, but who cares what cpp is in that case, as long you feel you got "good enough" value out of it?