Originally Posted by
GrayAnderson
I account for RDMs in the calculus because you're not getting nothing in the deal on that side of things, so there's a reduction in your net cost (presuming you have a use for the miles in question). And I'd add that with the "fancy" AA credit card (which I don't have yet), it'd add another 10 RDMs/$ to the calculus (so whacking another 5-15% off the effective cost, depending on what you were otherwise using). A situation with a hypothetical 35 LPs/$ as base earning (as some have cited) would yield 45.5 LPs/$ and 45 RDMs/$. If you did a stack of bookings (I'll figure out the nuances over in the other thread) at that rate, the scratch pad looks a bit like this for $3500:
$3500*45.5 LPs/$=159,250 LPs
$3500*45 RDMs/$=157,500 RDMs
Use your preferred valuation for the RDMs, but 150k RDMs is a lot of flights to Florida...or it can be a well-timed TCON/TATL flight in three-class F.
Oh, I do understand why people count the RDMs into the equation. However, it's a currency that we have far more of than we will use. All of our flights (except the occasional short repositioning flight, are for status, so we pay for them. So,
for us these added RDMs have no value and I would not include them in
out calculations. We only care about LP ratios and the rest is just the parsley on the plate that one often doesn't eat. So, valuing these at $0.00 each means that they don't affect the calculus when we look at LP ratios.
But all of our situations are different.
Cheers.