Originally Posted by
Syzygies
No one who ever travels internationally would spend miles at 1.2 cents domestic Y if they could instead realize 2-4 cents/mile J. I need to do something with a lot of Amex points, to finish migrating to Delta Reserve Amex, and transferring to Delta is one option. I could not find a single trip whatsoever that I could imagine taking, in J for better than 1.4 cents/mile. And that was an outlier. This was searching a week or two ago. Miles have become a consistently valued alternative to cash, with the faint benefit of refundability up to a few days before travel. No magic left that I could see. 2-4 cents/mile I'd jump on.
In other words, I believe the site that estimates 1.2 cents / mile today.
United's Saver Award level is 65-85K for J (depending on region), and they actually have a decent amount of availability at that level. Are you implying that you can get J trips to Asia on quality carriers for only 2K? Or to Europe for $1.6K? Those are economy prices, not J prices.
You are just wrong.. I don't know how else to say it. It is well known that International J redemptions have greater value than domestic Y. Even international Y has greater redemption value than domestic Y on average. There is actually an underlying reason for - on average (across all routes at least), it is easier to do supply/demand balancing for paying customers on domestic high volume routes as opposed to once a day international routings. Excess capacity will be allocated to saver award levels to help encourage traveling less popular routes. This is less needed in domestic routes where you can more aggressively adjust frequency, gauge, and have more alternative routing options via different hubs to balance demand.