Originally Posted by
tom911
I have a couple $191RT SFO-RDU/PHL/BWI spread over January and February. They were only available, at that price, on Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday. Only downside to those, currently, is that they're all on Airbus aircraft where upgrade potential, with 8 F seats, can be limited. Also have weekend trips to BWI and EWR for $240-260. Alaska never seems to have IAD/DCA on sale so I fly into BWI and train over to DC with MARC. Anytime I can bring in over 10,000 miles for less than $250 I'm happy. I burn through a lot of miles for international travel.
Like I said, the math is different (better) for a 75K. But that would add a lot of time sitting in planes for me. I’ve never flown 75,000 miles in a year from ALL sources (awards+paid fares), or so TripIt tells me forom my history since 2010 (and my international travel before then was less). The only years I come close are the ones where I do RTWs on miles. Natural travel on AS (including “this fare to NYC is cheap, let me spend a weekend there”) slots me in between 30k-40k. Do I want to spend twice as many hours in planes or can I just spend the money buying miles? I usually pick buying the miles.