Originally Posted by
Dillsnik
Looking to book RT from EWR (NYC area) to London Heathrow in January. Cash cost for the flight all in would be about $600 and change. I have enough miles to book at least one ticket for me at 48k miles, but it comes with $180 in tax and fees. I don't really fly united a ton so i guess it'd be good to get the mileage booking in but i guess it seems like a meh value bc of all the fee costs. could use some savings right now though, so tempted to pull trigger but wanted to see what others thought. Thank you!!
Good Lord, UK taxes have really gotten insane.
When you're calculating your value, you should probably compare to regular economy rather than basic economy, because that's what you're actually buying with the miles. So it's closer to an $800 ticket than a $600 ticket.
But more to the point, it sounds like the extra $400 is more valuable to you than the miles on an airline you don't fly often. That's what they're there for. I could tell you that the best use of United miles is a one-way redemption in first class from Southeast Asia to the US... but if you don't
need a one-way ticket from Southeast Asia to the US, what good does that do you? Forget calculations about how much value you're getting out of the miles, or what some blogger says they're worth, and do what's best for you. In this case, it sounds like that's a mileage ticket.
Originally Posted by
lhrsfo
Bloggers say that a mile is worth >1c but that's really only the case for premium cabin redemptions.
It's not really true that the 1 cent floor refers to premium cabin redemptions. In fact, people who have earned a significant fraction of their miles from a United credit card have an effective 1 cent floor on any ticket using United Choices -- they can pay cash and then get a statement credit at 1 cent per mile, up to the total number of miles that were earned via the credit card. And economy awards are often (not always) available at better than 1 cent per mile anyway.
ETA: Here's the Choices thread:
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unit...5-forward.html. Since OP has mileage from a credit card signup, this might be useful. It should reduce the out-of-pocket cost to $0 for not many more miles.