Originally Posted by
BasedinCLE
Believe me, it was painful to spend even 230k miles, but there were no saver awards available unless I wanted three layovers where one of them required an airport change and the other one was for 11 hours. I'm definitely going to keep an eye open for saver awards opening up or decreases in the everyday awards. The cost of the flight in cash would be $7,100, so it works out to 3 cpm for this award ticket, which I think is good.
The problem I have with such fantastical CPM claims is that with a bit of flexibility, you can generally find J fares for thousands less than that. For example, I see DTW-MUC for $2500 RT in business on UA and you can mix DTW-FRA (LH non-stop) with MUC-DTW return for about $3000 total. Sure, driving from CLE to DTW is somewhat inconvenient (but you are also trading that for a non-stop on the outbound), but most people would readily do that to save $4K. Further, almost no one really values these flights at $7K and would pay that much out of pocket other than the mega-rich. Can you really say these flights are truly "worth" that much to you. You can't really argue the "experience" is worth that much when they are charging thousands less for flights on the exact same equipment depending on when and where you depart from.