Hi all- I am very new here, and stumbled here googling around what I noticed as a sudden surge in miles required to fly business international. I am kicking myself for not booking sooner, but we were saving up miles to book a long awaited trip in business class to London. If I give some background, would anyone be so kind to offer friendly advice?

I am a Chase United Explorer card holder, but also have cards with Delta (Amex) and American (Citi). Due to a lot of cancelled travel during covid, I have a large (to me) travel credit with United for $1700. My husband and I were due to leave for an international trip on March 13, 2020 (ha). Since then we've had a baby, done some remodeling, and made it a goal to focus on earning Chase/United points to enable us to book one ticket in business class (outbound, economy return) and the other using our $1700 credit to take the ill fated 2020 trip next April for my husband's 35th birthday.

I am trying to figure out the best thing to do now that our miles have lost so much value. I currently have 135k miles and $1700 in credit I'd like to use. I know it is probably a bit wasteful to blow it all, and we could just fly economy, but...well, we were looking forward to this.

Trip would be SDF to ORD to LHR in April, leaving 4/2, 3 or 4 (flexible!), return 4/14 (not flexible). Booking inclusive of the SDF portion appears to be cheaper right now, which seems weird to me. I've read about Plan B booking and that seems unlikely to work for us?

I could book the trip using points to upgrade- booking us in Premium Plus on the way there, with the waitlist to business option, and then Premium Plus on the way home. I'd normally be perfectly happy in just regular economy on the return flight, but this doesn't appear to be an option- I *have* to upgrade on the way home too to do this. This would use 80k points and would be an extra $1400 in addition to our credit.

Or, I could book one business class ticket for $2300 (economy return, so $600 extra in addition to our credit), book the other outgoing to London as a one way (115k), wait until I have more points and hopefully get enough points for a saver economy return?

Or just wait and see if this all calms down??