With the occasional exception, the classic or fixed mileage rewards are are usually the best, but the seats allocated to them are limited. I find for flights within North America, if I book 6 months ahead there is usually good availability. If you can, be flexible with with your dates. Often midweek days like Wednesday can have better availability because most people want to fly from weekend to weekend, but of course no guarantee on what is available.


The market value rewards are essentially using miles converted to dollars to buy seats normally available for purchase. Usually, you need more miles than for classic rewards, but not always (ie of the cost tickets is really low at the time).

As others have stated, use you miles wisely: always check what the taxes and surcharges will be for a reward flight, and check what it would cost to simply buy a ticket. Take the difference between the two and divide by the number of miles needed for the reward to to get your $/mile return on miles. My rule of thumb is that anything less than 2 cents a mile is not worth it, and I generally dont use miles unless I can get more than 2.5 cents a mile. Of course that number will vary depending on how many miles you have and how much cash you have what what you perceive the value of each mile is. You can usually get gift cards a bit less than a cent a mile, so that also can put the lower limit what a mile is worth.