Originally Posted by
SFOdelayed
Sure you would, if you need any flexibility in your travel as award tickets for 1Ks or GS are basically fully flexible.
The discussion was about the value of miles to "kettles".
Originally Posted by
halls120
If you are an elite, I agree. Do you think the average kettle pays any attention to the details we discuss here? I don't. And if they do care, they applied for a credit card that gave them 50000 free miles for merely using it on things they'd normally buy, right? So maybe the extra 20000 miles they need for the trip are not such a good deal, but are they going to care? Not immediately, IMHO. Maybe once they consider the long term they will see how UA is taking advantage of them, but I doubt it.
Maybe. But I'm not sure people are as stupid as that. Certainly consumers pay close attention to price when booking tickets — nobody today doubts that — so basing a business on the assumption that they'll never look at the conversion rate between miles and dollars seems risky in the long run.