mikew99

I disagree with those who base the value only on what you would pay for the ticket. I redeem miles only for C/F awards. (I can afford to pay for most coach tickets, so there's no "value" in that for me.) The amount of money I am willing to pay for a C/F ticket rarely intersects with the cost of that ticket. So without using miles, I would never be able to travel in international F at all!

So the fact that I might only be willing to pay $2,000 for that international F ticket doesn't mean that that's the value. The value is increased by the fact that I can't/won't pay more, so I am getting something I otherwise couldn't afford or wouldn't otherwise pay for.

This is part of the "indescribable value" that jrmcrm mentions above. You can't ignore that just because it's hard to calculate.

belfordrocks

My valuation:

LAN & QF 1 cent
Most programs 2 cents
Amex MR 2.5 cents
SPG 4-5 cents

AlohaDaveKennedy

Yes, in fact I am playing Ping Pong transferring miles between 5 accounts. And at less than 1.1 because, for example, you can have one account with 90k send 3 30k transfers to 3 different accounts for the same one-time $30 fee.

Of course you are not going to redeem SkyPesos for domestic flights, but rather flights like transatlantic hops that go for say 60k SkyPesos when Kayak's lowest fare is say 1.5k Dollars.

zkzkz

what on earth? how does ping ponging miles between accounts manufacture miles?

jonman21

See: http://www.delta.com/skymiles/buy_tr..._lto/index.jsp

flyBernoulli

Wow, so does this mean that you max out the number of miles you're allowed to purchase directly from the airlines? They can generally be had for 2.5-3 cents/mile (much less in some cases, Delta and US Airways for example). Otherwise, why wouldn't you redeem at this level?

JapanFlyerT

I fly international coach and generally use the 2 cents rule.

Though recent changes (*A and SkyPesos) have devalued some of the NE to SE Asia routes to the point it is better to buy. Going from Japan to NE Asia, Micronesia, HNL, N. America/Europe is still around 2cpm.

iahphx

I doubt many flyertalkers bought miles at 2.2 cents from ticket brokers. For ordinary travellers, that would be a rip-off. I would assume these transactions were for immediate biz class awards where the buyers thought they were getting a better value than buying the published fares.

BTW, do such brokers exist these days? You sure don't hear much about them.

You probably missed the part where I said that some airlines were a little above 1.5 (Star) and some below (Delta). I do think DL miles are worth at least a penny, but how much above that is a very debatable question. We all know that DL has a generally weak award chart, but the reason it's so hard to value a DL mile is the "trouble" you have in redeeming the miles at the saver rate. If you live in a place where you must start your travel on DL, you are not going to value a Skymile very highly. If you live in a place served by DL partners who fly to places you want to go, you will assign more value to a Skymile.

Personally, I have a lot of Skymiles because I find them harder to spend than my other ff miles. So while they may be worth 1.1 cent, given the trouble I have redeeming them, I'd only want to fork over my hard earned cash if I could pick them up at a discount. I wouldn't be interested in paying "fair value" unless I had a specific use and great confidence that the award seats would be available. Otherwise, to store them for future use, I would be willing to buy "unlimited" Skypesos at approximately .7 cpm. I'd guess many flyertalkers would agree to similar terms.

darthbimmer

I figure that redeeming miles for coach tickets usually returns a value in the range of 1.6 - 2.0 cpm. Redemption fees, fuel surcharges, and other garbage fees can seriously diminish these values.

I find that using points for premium class tickets on international flights returns nominal values in the range of 3.0 - 6.0 cpm. I emphasize nominal because I consider them overpriced. For example, business tickets are often 3-4x the cost of coach, but I value them at only 2x coach. Taking that into account, their value to me is 1.5 - 4cpm.

On the whole I value airline miles at 1.8cpm when making choices about exchanging points between systems or comparing options for bonuses.

jamar

When redeeming on UA for an NH China-Japan award it's always been more than 1cpm for me; usually 2-3 if we just go by Y redemptions (for example, a 20k award is $600 or so during certain time periods).

srt8-blue

Agree! International travel is the way to go. Save your miles for international.

FlyerChrisK

^^

While I get a bit of a kick out of burning miles at a face value substantially more than say, 2cpm, I understand that I wouldn't normally buy myself round-the-world tickets in first. Consequently, my RDM valuation is mostly set at a bit higher than what I can do the ticket for in Y (but a bit higher for the comfort of J/F and for the flexibility of stopovers, etc. that revenue tickets might not provide [at least for free])

lkar

You're doing better on coach than I can usually do except in the rarest of instances. But when I figure out my cpm for a coach redemption, I also discount it by assigning a proportionate value to the miles I did not earn for the flight since I'm on an award ticket. If you're doing that and getting 1.6 to 2.0 cpm, that's really impressive.

TheManofaThousandPlaces

This is a critical point to understand. Miles may be quite valuable (up to 10 cents each) today, but can be devalued very quickly...kind of like the currency of an unstable government. The incentive, then, is to use the miles quickly.

Yuengling

Given theoretical unlimited travel availability, I agree. But I have the trips I can take and that's it. My last three trips were

IAD-DFW in Y for 25K (x4)
TRI-PBI in Y for 25K (x4)
IAD-FCO in C for 110K (x2)

Some people would look at that and say I'm "wasting" miles. But those are the trips I wanted to take and I took them when I wanted.