CO FF

How and where do you want to travel? On sAAver tix to Europe, it's 2 in F or 4 in Y.

OTOH, if you wanted to fly to, say, the MidEast on a partner award in J, at 135k each it's not enough.

Samiam

As mentioned before, all that really matters is if it is alot to you.

Patrick Bateman

It's a lot of miles to me.

discoboy

I have to use the miles to purchase 4 tickets at a time for the family so I was thinking of doing 4 rt on Alaska to Vancouver from SFO for the olympics and then 4 rt. to Hawaii.
Would that be a good value for the miles?
What is the required miles to travel to London in coach?
D.

Hagbard Viking

If you had 30k to travel, would you spend it on two F tickets? If not, what's your point?

Hagbard Viking

How much would those tickets cost to buy? What else can you do with the miles? What would the value be to you?

http://www.aa.com/aa/i18nForward.do?...jsp#awardchart

Who would have thought that this info could be found on aa.com of all places?

tom911

SFO to Vancouver may not be the best use depending on what the route prices at. It's too far out to get prices for 2010. If you can get a ticket in the $200 range you might want to save the miles for something that would cost more. Frequent flyer seats may disappear quickly when they do open up. You won't know until you start playing with dates, fares, and availability. All those factor into a decision. I used an award ticket for the Beijing Olympics and booked 11 months ahead, and did that primarily in the event I needed to cancel (cheap insurance--$150 to cancel the ticket). If you are looking at using miles for Vancouver, you do want to look that far out for the best options.

With recent SFO-Honolulu fares up in the $600 range this would be a good time to use miles there. It would be 35K in coach off peak, with higher priced awards available.

As low as 40K between October 15-May 15. I'll be using one of those myself in December for a week visit.

maddjake

Brilliant question. That's EXACTLY the issue that's often missed when people ponder the riddle of "how much are miles worth?"

The worth of your miles is determined by your willingness to pay -- in cash -- for the services redeemed with those miles. Not the actual price of those services as charged by the airlines.

holtju2

It is not. It is peanuts.

bayoullb

I say spend it quickly. Miles are not worth what they used to...

passinginterest

An average executive platinum by definition earns this number of miles every year he re-qualifies.

BLG

Mrs. BLG and I each have about 200,000 banked and I would say that we both consider our balances nice, but not anything stupendous. If I had more than 400,000 banked I would consider it a lot because I would be thinking that it was dumb to let that many bank in a mileage-inflating world. With 200-250 I figure I'm still in the ball park where I can use them for a RT Asia award in F or something else that would be feel worthwhile and have some leftover for an upgrade here and there.

Patrick Bateman

Isn't how many miles are used as relevant as how many miles are earned?

bdemaria

Or she....

AAir_head

Actually, you're both wrong...your neighbors will be richer once you've had a chance to "spread the wealth around"...and you will be "happier" since you had the opportunity to "change" their lives for the better.

Won't you?



Oh, and to OP...as some others have stated, it's relative. This will be my second year as EXP, qualifying on segments; at the end of the year I'll have about 400K program to date and about 250K "in the bank". I've averaged about 150K RDM/year and about 80K EQM for the last two years. I've been an AAdvantage member since Jan 2006. Some here accumulate miles faster than that, some slower. Within the relatively rarefied company kept here at FT, I'll guess I'm on the below average end of the scale when it comes to accumulation of miles.

Does it really matter what any of us think of how many miles you have? I think not. If you're happy with the miles and with what you do with them, that's what counts.

cheers!