redtop43

It would be interesting to see what miles would sell for it there were a competitive market for them. Of course that would totally screw up pricing, because there would become an effective ceiling on ticket prices based on the market price of points.

I tend to only use my points for friends and family, since I want to get elite credit for my own flights. But there is often a major disconnect between last-minute pricing. It's not uncommon for last-minute tickets to have extremely high cash prices while being available for saaver award tickets.

My best redemption ever (not on AA) was about ten years ago. There was a girl I liked and she called and told me she had a few unexpected days off from work. While she was ranting about the incompetence of the scheduling that gave her this without giving her time to plan, I was online checking award availability. She lived in Canada, and a cash ticket for the next day was $2000 but it was available for 25000 points.

I have a friend with whom I often exchange various kinds of favors, and we have a "cash settlement" price of 1.5 cents for United and AA and 1.25 cents for Delta, if we find we can't actually trade like kind. But I try to avoid trades with him at all, because he doesn't seem to understand that X points in his account aren't exactly the same as X points in my account.