Originally Posted by
happy10345
That’s true…so for Hilton and Hyatt, I think comparing the two is nuts because Hilton hands points out like crazy, but also charges more to use them.
What I find crazy here is that earning Avios is generally easier then Skymiles, so when they also charge 4-5x more to redeem it makes Skymiles an especially worthless currency.
For domestic coach awards (which is how most people use miles according to some stats DL put out a few years ago), DL miles tend to be in the ballpark of other programs and are more useful for things like seat upgrades (DL metal awards also qualify for 15% DL Amex discount). Most people don't hang out on FT and fixate over mileage value and engage in manufactured spend and credit card churn. You also cherry-picked one-way awards where DL will be particularly bad values as the cheaper award levels will generally require a roundtrip booking on international awards (to correlate with revenue fare pricing which also require roundtrip bookings for cheapest revenue fares). DL has coach roundtrip awards on JFK-SCL starting at 32K miles roundtrip, but you will never see these roundtrip award levels if doing one-way award searches.