Kacee

Ditto.

Airfare is not priced on a cost basis. It's priced based on demand for travel between specific city pairs.

Super Mario

If there was a flight you had no intention of buying priced at $3000, would you buy it if it went down to $2250? Because apparently, getting a 25% "extra valuation" in points is the greatest decision you can make. I consider my points to essentially be part of my cash. Yes, sometimes you may be better off using one over the other. In the end, my reasonable expected value is going where I want. I'll start with where I want to go and work backwards as to what is the cheapest was vs picking something because I feel like I got more.

Now what I will say is a poor value, is redeeming for cash, products, and gift cards.

ijgordon

DL, UA, and AA have all moved to some form of dynamic award pricing, where, in theory, the award price in miles is proportional to the cash price at any given time. In practice, this works out to a fairly reliable 1.3 cents per mile valuation on DL SkyMiles (not absolute, but in the vast majority of cases it's around there), although you can get better "value" on partners. UA and AA are newer at this, and I don't know what the conversions look like.

guv1976

For travel this Wednesday, AA is offering SYR-SNA (via ORD) as an Economy Web Special for 5,000 miles + $5.60. The one-way cash fare on the identical flights is $378, so a redemption value of approximately 7.4˘/mile!

Kacee

UA and AA still offer fixed price saver level fares with redemptions possible at over 3 cpp, particularly for domestic within the 7 advance purchase window.

hhdl

JetBlue (and Southwest) are the least dependent on selling miles to credit card issuers, so that sort of devaluation is easier to implement.

The interesting frontier in mile/point devaluation is revenue-based and limiting the outsized values to discounts on high-markup cash fares.

Hypothetical example: BOS-CDG on DL in May, round-trip
J cash fare: $17,175 (excl. taxes/fees/charges)
121k RDM + $11,125 ($0.05 discount per RDM)
298k RDM + $7,585 ($0.032 discount per RDM)
711k RDM + $3,455 ($0.019 discount per RDM)
2.0M RDM + $0 ($0.0085 discount per RDM)

You can even imagine a slider if the IT gets its act together.

There's a defensible valuation there of 5 cents per SkyMile. Diamond Medallion booking with DLAX is theoretically getting 65% back on their spend. But I doubt DL would be crying about giving someone a 3-5 cpm redemption when they're getting the best part or more of $10k cash for BOS-CDG-BOS in J. Meanwhile, it's a pretty steep devaluation if you're looking for a free flight.

randian

Do I correctly understand your chart putting the zero cash option at 2 million miles? If that's where we're headed then points as a means for the more average, or even upper middle class, consumer to afford a luxury vacation are dead. Signup bonuses on the big cards add up to maybe a couple hundred thousand miles. It would take a lifetime to get the remainder of the 2 million with organic spending, and by then it will be a lot more than 2 million. I'm assuming you're traveling alone, do it as a couple and even the 2nd from the bottom is still $7,000 plus 1.4 million miles.

mia

Curious why this is the starting point for the computation when DL has published business class fares for that route in May ranging from $23694.00 down to $2500.00?

EAJuggalo

If the flights I was looking at were A-B-C vs A-C I would agree with you. But I was pointing out that B-C was 45% more expensive than A-B-C. The reason for this I believe is that in this case there is much more competition ORD-CDG than there is MSP-CDG.

Gig103

Delta domestic flights seem to vary between $0.012 and $0.018 on my last few flights when I checked. The latter value was because it was a last minute booking where only higher fares were left but there was simultaneously a sale to use miles (19k main for what was a $339 cash fare, BE was only 11k miles round trip). I have never used Avios but understand they can work out nicely for last minute deals too when AA hasn't decimated Saaver using "Web specials" instead.

I would never compare my points to full J, but the Devil's advocate in me does recognize that award flights can be cancelled for $150 (waived for DMs and maybe PMs), something the $2500 fares I buy for cash cannot do.