Originally Posted by
kthomas
Very quick reply: miles do not seem to be tied to fares departing Europe at all. Most awards that I see are 130/140K + ~$250US departing Europe to US, when available, even for routes that would be ~$700 cash; for Econ Light; often Main Cabin is unavailable and occasionally PS is offered at ~180K miles + tax.
None of these offers appears at all reasonable to me FWIW.
It appears there is no simple way to get any insight into the overall market.
Unlike revenue fares, there are not separate award levels with Skymiles for ex-US/Canada awards vs. ex-EU awards for TATL flights. While with revenue fares, there are separate fare filings that apply depending on your point-of-origin (with EU origin fares being cheaper at times than US origin fares depending on origin country). The award levels to/from US/Canada do in fact largely correlate with revenue fare pricing, but they correlate to ex-US/Canada revenue fares, and not the ex-EU revenue fare prices you are looking at. Just like with cheapest revenue fares, the cheapest award levels generally have significant advance purchase requirements and roundtrip booking requirements.
As an example, the cheapest roundtrip Main fares on DTW-FCO for travel through much of August are currently around $2K USD roundtrip (14-day AP K fares), while cheapest roundtrip Main fares ex-FCO for FCO-DTW are around 1K Euro. The cheapest roundtrip Main Skymiles award levels on DTW-FCO for this period are 188K roundtrip (which book into NK award class -- note the symmetry with revenue K class). However, these 188K roundtrip award levels apply whether you begin your journey from DTW or FCO.
Booking close-in to/from US/Canada will generally never yield anything good because of the advance purchase requirements of the cheapest award levels. If you book from EU to other continents like Asia, Africa, Central/South America, you can at times find decent deals as awards on these routes generally don't have advance purchase requirements for cheapest levels.