Originally Posted by
prometa
Net net I am spending $6k/yr of my own money instead of $12-18k to fly in J in practically every intl flight plus getting another $10k or so a year in residual value in employee upgrades that pay dividend in terms of happiness and retention.
Granted 75% of my costs are OPM, but the value of 1K is so ludicrously good I would be silly not to stretch to requalify.
Humorously, I end up at #5-10 on CPU list every domestic segment. Haven’t seen a CPU for at least 2 years now.
Your calculation is wrong. You’re not getting anywhere near as much value from PlusPoints are you’re attributing to them. The appropriate comparison point is not the cash price, it’s the price of the miles+copay award you’re not using: if you value MileagePlus miles at $0.015 each, and that’s probably an overestimate, then 30 PlusPoints are worth about $800 or so depending upon the route. And you get less value if you’d otherwise be flying in Y and therefore using more PlusPoints per trip. Not coincidentally, $800 is also approximately the amount that gets reported for Polaris upgrades on lightly-loaded flights.
You also need to factor in the unpredictability of waitlisted upgrades; the day may come when UA comes for your clearance ratio too.
I’m not saying that you’re wrong to value 1K, just that people need to take a more nuanced look at it lest people spend way more money out of pocket than makes sense.
Originally Posted by
FlyfromDenver
With 1.6 million lifetime miles, 1K is worth whatever x 2 with a MM companion. It's looking like under $3000 for me but I do get some PQP from the Quest card so I'm working on it.
MM companions don’t get PlusPoints unless they earn them on their own.