Originally Posted by
indufan
While I agree with
xliioper that starting with a price search is the best option in this case, I don't agree with his/her repeated assertion that the fares are all that correlated. You can routinely beat 1 cpm, especially with the 15% discount. Having said that, can you narrow it down at all? I mean about how many miles are you looking at spending? International or domestic destinations? Beach, mountains, history? So many variables....and even "around the 4th of July" is not very specific when it comes to miles. Insane variances depend on those details.
Never said they were completely correlated (like WN). 1.2 - 1.3 CPM seems to be about average, but there can certainly be better deals than that. The 153K roundtrip D1 awards to LHR are close to 1.8 - 1.9 CPM after 15% discount (accounting for taxes) as D1 fares are in the $3K range. The catch is the $3K D1 fares are good all summer while the 153K D1 awards have seasonality restrictions on them and are only good through early May. There are summer seasonal D1 awards from 212.5K miles roundtrip after discount. At any rate, I was able to find the summer GVA award levels with a Google Flights fare search for lowest fares. Awards to ARN are in a similar range for the summer. The main cabin coach fares to ARN are also available from around $1000 roundtrip and also found these via Google Flights.