DevilBucsFlyer

I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but there are new FTers joining every day. Until I started reading this message board, I didn't realize that I should never (and I mean NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER EVER NEVER!) burn miles on domestic coach awards!

I just burned nearly all of my Delta miles on 3 First Class Awards on Delta/Malaysian to SE Asia (routing TPA-CVG-LAX-TPE-KUL-SGN-KUL-TPE-LAX-CVG-TPA). This "cost" me 420,000 Delta miles. At one point in my life, I would have thought someone a fool to "waste" 420,000 miles on a single trip! Of course, I now know better.

Just out of curiosity, I pulled up my itinerary on ITA Software to see how it would price out. $10,449.22 per ticket - let's round it to $31,500 for all three. A "value" of $.075/mile.

Of course, I could have used those 420,000 miles on domestic coach tickets. I could have gotten 17 round trip 25,000 mile coach tickets (425,000 miles, technically). But how much does a domestic coach ticket cost? $200-$300 out of Tampa? At $300, 17 would still only be worth $5,100 - or a measly $.012/mile. As a matter of fact, those 17 domestic coach tickets would have to average a cost of over $1,850 each to get the same value as I got by booking the FC international awards.

Is there temptation to use "orphaned" miles on some infrequent airline for a domestic award? Sure. But in today's environment, you never know where those miles might end up. The 29,000 US Air miles might be convertible into United or Delta miles next month. Virtually any airlines could merge and give you greater potential value for you "orphaned" miles.

Plus, with today's low cost carriers (AirTran, SouthWest & JetBlue are the three I'm specifically thinking of), you never know when you'll be able to earn tickets that are restricted to domestic use because you start travelling somewhere that these airlines are the logical choice (I'm amazed at the number of tickets I've earned on SouthWest and AirTran without even trying). One would think that the trend would be for more LCC to enter the market and make these domestic tickets even easier to earn. Not to mention the latest trend of legacy carriers with their fly-3-fly-free type promotions.

Everyone may have unique situations that mean burning miles for domestic coach makes sense. But for me? NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER EVER NEVER!