Unless I'm missing something, you can always request specific flights with FF award tickets. The difference between it and the Cap One FF program being discussed is with Cap One, you are looking at the pool of purchaseable seats, whereas for FF awards, it's the pool of award seats, which is going to be much less, and especially for Hawaii routes, much much tighter.
Jeff:
Yes, that's what I meant and that's a good way to put it. You can request any flight with airline award tickets, but the availability pool for
revenue tickets is much greater and more flexible than the pool for award tickets. Since the Miles One award doesn't limit the price of the ticket, but limits the amount they will contribute, there's a lot of flexibility there.
Basically, with the DL award tickets, we had to work our way backwards from the outbound date we wanted to find availability and work our way forwards from the return flights we wanted. They ended up traveling outbound about a week earlier than the rest of us and returning several days later. It's not always possible to do that, especially if you have a job or attend school. We were fortunate that it did work out well for two of us (my wife and our 4 year old.) My teenager and I didn't have that flexibility.
Using your calculations, I spent 60k miles to get 2 tickets valued at $2100. The value is $.035 per mile. The UA ticket purchased with Miles One "miles", the cost was $250 out of pocket plus 40k Miles One "miles" and we earned approx. 10,000 UA status miles (HNL-ORD-TPA-ORD-HNL). At $.035 per mile, the value is $350 which is greater than the out of pocket cost. Is that what you meant? That doesn't take into account the "cost" of the Miles One "miles".
-David
[This message has been edited by LIH Prem (edited 03-28-2001).]