Originally Posted by
sdsearch
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?
Many of us do "aspirational" travel (hotels and flights) when possible. For most of us, that's not AA or UA metal. We like at CX, EK, etc. Let me put it this way. If you value UR at 2.1 cpp, would you buy 1 UR for 2.1 (or even 2.0) cents? I wouldn't.
Regarding the last point, I generally am content to get "good enough" value out of my points. I don't calculate down to the fraction of a cent all the time. But many do. The reason is they compare the cost of a point to the opportunity cost of, say, a cash back card. The standard for most is 2 cents, as that is what a card like Citi DoubleCash gets.