Originally Posted by jigri2003

As with many others, trying to figure out how best these points would be used for airfare. Can someone with the following metrics be kind enough to check what the booking engine asks to charge for the following scenario:

1. more than 50K points in point balance
2. look for 2 tickets more than $500 each
3. each ticket's price should be somewhat above what could be covered on a combined basis by the points balance.

This is the critical test. A useful example would be a points balance of ~54K, and search for 2 tickets of $550 each. Theoretically, the booking engine should require 54K points + $310:

1. 25K pts for the 1st ticket's initial $500 cost
2. 5k pts for the remaining $50 cost of the 1st ticket.
3. 24k pts remaining. Because there are fewer than 25k pts remaining after charging for the 1st ticket, there should not be enough to generate a $500 coverage of the 2nd ticket's cost for 25k pts.
4. The engine should take the remaining 24k pts but only for the initial $240 of the 2nd ticket's cost
5. then charge $310 for the rest of the 2nd ticket's cost.
The 54k pts really only provided $790 in airfare credit, so around 1.46c in airfare value. To get back closer to 2cpp, one would have to have enough pts to cover 1 ticket entirely (as close to $500 as possible ideally) and have at least 25k pts remaining to get another $500 credit for a second ticket.

However, if the engine's charge sequence is actually
1. take 25k pts and credit $500 to 1st ticket's cost
2. take 25k pts and credit $500 to 2nd ticket's cost
3. take remaining 4k pts and credit $40 to 1st ticket's cost
4. require $60 charge for remaining cost of each ticket ($10 for 1st ticket and $50 for 2nd ticket)
then we have these points being around 1.93cpp in airfare value without needing to generate significant pts above the $3k spending requirement. A comment on a blog seemed to indicate this is how it actually works when booking 2 tickets, but would love to get additional data points to confirm.