Originally Posted by
chiproos
I remember when cashing in 60,000 miles on TWA/AA got you 2 first class tix to Europe.
[...]
I'm taking my family to Montana (BZN) and of course there are no saver awards available and flying STL-ORD-BZN requires a redemption of 60,000 miles/person.
[...]
Any comments?
Yes. You mentioned using miles long ago for
premium tickets
overseas.
That's still the best value for AA miles. (And
second-best value is
any kind of tickets
overseas.)
SAAver awards on AA these days are mostly available
only from some partner airlines (many of which aren't shown on aa.com, so if that's the only place you're looking, you may not realize they have availability), which means mostly for
overseas travel.
IMHO it's a waste to use miles for (non-emergency) domestic coach travel at AAnytime (last seat) rates. And if Bozeman is too expensive to fly to (on cash fares) because it's too small,
consider flying to Calgary and driving down. (The more people there are on the plane, the more significant the (cash) savings are from flying to a further but bigger and thus typically cheaper airport and then driving the rest of the way (where all the people fit into one rental car), especially in the sparsely-populated parts of the country.)
So while the miles you'd get with the AA credit card could be useful for
something else, the Bozeman trip at 60kx4 doesn't seem a good use IMHO.