Originally Posted by
pinniped
It's perhaps more common if your home program is a U.S. program. I see it once or twice a year when I'm redeeming awards on AA.
Could well be, I do little domestic flying. And I'm not very familiar with the AA program, I have never earned miles on it to redeem anything but magazines (to stop all the points from expiring completely).
I'm not expert on Hyatt and have never reached Diamond with them so can't comment on what the top-tier treatment is like. But in my limited experience as a Platinum (technically a low-tier elite, but barely) they've been okay. 2 cpp on points for simple one-nighters is about what I've experienced, although no doubt some Hyatt experts can do better.
Thanks, I will start looking at them now that I'm aware of this option.
I'd argue that it's sometimes worse, sometimes not. Depends on the program, award chart, quality of the Y and J services, sometimes equipment type, actual availability of each award, etc. I find any blanket statement here like "never redeem Y" or "never redeem J/F" to be too restrictive. I want to look at all the options and decide where the optimal value lies.
So it seems we are looking for different things - I'm looking for lowest cost primarily, not necessarily best value. Of course if cost is equal, I will take the J/F ticket. Just have not seen that situation yet for my upcoming flights on Air France, Vietnam Airlines, China Eastern, VietJet Air, and Jetstar airways, to name all the airlines we will be flying next month - 7 flights in total from 6 different airlines. Only the Air France ticket was booked as as an award, mainly because AF doesn't sell 1-way non-award tickets at a reasonable price (always many times the cost of round-trip), all the other flights were booked as low cash fares and redeemed at 1.5cpp through Chase, or cash fare and refunded on the Arrival+ by signup bonus, or cash fare and charged to my Prestige, which should be refunded as the airline credit on the next statement. I still have $100 flight credit to use on my Prestige but figure we'll probably use it for incidentals (baggage, etc) given all these upcoming flights.
The flexibility *is* part of the value. If you've ever used a flexible currency (mine is SPG) to top off an award, you know how valuable a few thousand of the *right* points at the right time can be.
I don't disagree that it's a valuable benefit for the program, just disagree that it should figure into the average cpp to a much higher value. If you figure your "last, missing" 2000 points are worth a lot, you also would have to figure that your, say, previous 23,000 points would not be worth much, or worthless if you can't book anything at all for that amount. In the end it is the average cpp that matters. I don't mind paying cash fare/room if instead of points if the awards are unfavorable. Chase UR with the CSR also allows you to buy a cash fare with a combination of cash + points at 1.5cpp, so the situation about being short a fixed number of miles for redemption is much less likely to occur. And in general, I find 1.5cpp to be a better value than most economy flight awards, which are typically between only 0.6 and 1.2cpp on the ones I priced depending on flight/airline.