My wife and I do a fair amount of leisure travel and we book the front of the plane. We book a lot with United both because United often has great flights out of our hometown, LAS, and because we have the Chase Sapphire card that gives 3 points that can be converted to 3 United miles for every dollar spent on travel and restaurants--we eat out a lot. At least once in the past we bought 100,000 United miles for something like 1.8 cents per mile. Generally we find that for flying to Asia or Europe, if we plan ahead, the United miles are only worth about 1.5 cents per mile vs. the price of the cash refundable business class ticket. However, sometimes a day or two before a flight we can re-book either a refundable fare or an award fare at a great awards rates because United has empty business class seats on that a flight. In addition, if we ever had to or wanted to buy a last minute business class ticket to or from Europe or Asia, the price in award miles vs. the last minute cash price would make the award miles worth far more than 1.5 cents per mile (of course, only if there was award availability). In probably 20 award transpacific or transatlantic award flights we only had one minor involuntary downgrade on an award flight: coming back from TYO thru SFO to LAS one of us was bumped down to economy from first for the SFO-LAS flight. We were both United Silver at that time.

And, because of the Sapphire card's access to Priority Lounges my question for our situation is: Are the lower level United statuses really worth anything? My impression is that the answer is no. Recently, we had the choice of buying from Delta a nonstop: LAS-AMS or from United for almost the same price LAS-SFO-AMS. The Delta flight was more convenient but the United flight would have given us Silver status for the year. (And we would have preferred earning the United rather than Delta miles.) But we just couldn't see that United Silver status for us was worth the less convenient flight. Any thoughts?