Originally Posted by
roadtripman
Maybe in your experience, and based on your departure cities. I've never had a mile valued at less than 2 cents, unless you are talking a short-hop award ticket (and I seriously hope people aren't gullible enough to redeem for a 1000 mile flight valued at $200 with their 25,000 miles).
I value my miles quite high, based on what you can get for them at their maximum value. For example, I fly a lot from Canada - Peru. Tickets on this route are ALWAYS upwards of $1000, but are a mere 30,000 miles to redeem on AA. Likewise, last year I redeemed a ticket to Ushuaia, Argentina (at the southern tip near Antarctica) for a mere 40,000 miles when the value of the same-itinerary ticket was available for purchase for $2,600 (a value of 6.5 cents per mile). And no, I don't measure value in how much I am *purchasing* the miles for, I'm measuring them in what the value of the product you are recieving in return for the miles (how much AA, for example, is "paying" you). So in that case, the higher the better.
As for me finding another forum to discuss this in, I'm not too sure I was interested enough in discussing it in the first place - I'm mainly just calling a spade a spade and challenging the rather pessimistic and depressing claim of 1 cent per mile.
You will note that I already cited some examples ("international premium class saver awards" as a whole) where miles are worth more than 1 cent each, so you are essentially just repeating what I already stated. You might try reading a little more carefully next time.
Also, you are contradicting yourself by stating: "And no, I don't measure value in how much I am *purchasing* the miles for," where a few posts above you stated: "The actual monetary value for buying miles on AA.com is 4 cents per mile." Hmmm.... @:-) (Actually, your math is wrong anyhow: $1,000 for 40,000 miles is a purchase price of 2.5 cents/mile.
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Nevertheless, one cent per mile is commonly used -- even, as I said, by Randy Petersen himself. If you want to challenge that valuation, have a look at those threads in MilesBuzz first.