With taxes it worked out to about 1.4c/mile. I have never flown international F, but I think this will be my one happy chance to do it for a non-astronomical price.

I have often said that the miles have an incremental value that is overlooked. In your case 65,500 miles was useless for what you wanted, so that last 2,000 miles was extremely valuable. This is why some mileage/point currencies have even greater value, because they are more flexible in that regard.

US recently had a bonus miles promotion (see this thread) that allowed the "purchase" of miles for about $.007 per mile, there are a lot of folks who felt that was a good value and in some cases spent $10's of thousands of dollars buying miles. Guess some folks thought $1,000 plus taxes for an international F ticket was a good deal. :)

1) Although this discussion evolved to a focus on the miles purchase programs, the OP's question included buying other things to get the miles for them.

2) There's a circumstance in which economic (wo)man goes stupid in making a purchase for miles. It's when one is desperately facing the imminent expiry of a FF account, and one finds oneself giving scant attention to where one touches the demand curve.

Great discussion, I was actually referring to buying some "products" through your FF online store to up your miles, for either the whole award or just to "top up"

I guess it all goes back to "it depends" on what a person hopes to accomplish.

I think there is always a point in which its cheaper to fly to get the miles then to buy them. But if you can buy something AND get miles then its a two for one deal.

For UA people there was a wine deal, 40 miles for each dollar spent. I was VERY lucky that my family as well as friends drink wine so I went Xmas shopping. I was able to get 400K of miles for 10K (among that was an order for some Dr's I work with) so I was able to get some miles, great wine and xmas presents done without leaving my computer.

That's quite a few miles. What do you plan on doing with them?

I will not buy something which is not important just to earn a miles!...never, ever!....

My goal is $0.01/rdm, and $0.05/eqm. Averaging more like $.015/rdm.

My best redemptions have been around $0.10/rdm.

Truthfully, it's almost impossible to not redeem for less then you paid for them (if you redeem correctly). So as long as it's cheaper to buy points and redeem, then to buy tickets, what does our opinion matter?

For me, a total throwaway purchase would need to yield miles at about 0.75 cents. That is, I'd probably drop $750 right now for 100,000 miles that I will use at some point in the future.

It's true that I can usually achieve 1.5 to 2 cents per mile in value from today's miles (which I acquired at some point in the past). But I won't spend that kind of money in 2010 dollars to acquire new miles to use at an unknown point in the future under unknown program rules.

I'm more apt to spend a little closer to my "real" value on hotel points because the lifespan of 1 hotel point in any of my accounts is pretty short. I earn 'em and burn 'em with relative ease. The oldest point I currently hold is probably an 18-ish month old Starpoint. (A wise old Starpoint it is... :p) All of my Marriott and Hilton points are very young pups.


I don't ordinarily purchase int'l J/F out of my own pocket, so any higher valuations on air miles are meaningless to me. If I was ever given the opportunity to do so, I might spend $2,000 R/T for TATL F. But that's hypothetical - no airline will really sell it to me for cash and perhaps I've conditioned myself to think of it that way by backing into my comfortable 1.5c valuation.

You bring up a great point: the time-value of money/miles. People that are going to immediately redeem the earned miles are likely to pay more for them which it appears is reflected in most members' responses.

Indeed - I'd pay more if I was topping off to book a major award. The airlines will charge you a hefty price for an instant purchase that confidently posts instantly, but the hotels all have fairly reasonable point-purchase options.

Using a partner gets dicier unless the airline is going to let me put the award seat on hold for a couple weeks...

I think everyone agrees it is worth buying miles for both airlines and hotels when needed to top up a major award.

I bought a few thousand on Marriott so that I could redeem for a room in Sydney Harbour on New Years Eve (vs. rate of $600/nt+). Also bought a couple thousand AA miles to top off an award for two business class seats to Europe on LX (now a *A member). In each case well worth <$100 given the value received.

Obviously there are other instances when it makes sense to pay $ to take advantage of a special offer that you otherwise would not do. The IC Ambassador offer ($150 membership for 25k DL miles plus the standard IC BOGO cert) comes to mind. Also I waited to apply for the Chase WN visa ($59 annual fee - 24 credits with balance transfer) until I needed them to bump me up to 100 credits for a WN companion pass. These are occasional limited opportunities that usually hit flyertalk and are well worth doing IMO as there will almost always be an occasion down the road where you need the points. But as always YMMV.

Where can I find this IC Ambassador offer? I'll be staying at IC in SFO in Feb. I was going to buy it anyway and I didn't know they had that sort of offers. Is there a similar offer for AA? Thanks!

RE: OP
I usually trade on points.com and average 0.3¢ - 0.5¢ a mile.

On that note you could have gotten a round the word ticket in business for around $2100 with that deal as well. Less if you some of the deals that let you get a F ticket with multiple stopovers that I've read about here on the forum.

Sorry, long gone. Like the 100k BA credit offer, the good deals are rarely permanent, though you may find it resuscitated.

These days you still get the IC BOGO cert (buy1get1 weekend night free at any IC hotel) and 5k PC points with your annual membership, but no miles AFAIK.