I know there have been plenty of threads regarding the value of a mile. However now I am asking the question with a twist. Pretend that their is absolutely no increased benefit to you the flyer for sitting in an upgraded class. I know this may be hard for some of you, but for me its a fact of life. I am just a lowly student who is young and can rough it. I would rather save the miles and sit in coach than spend the miles for C. Consequently I will never be able to claim that my ticket would have cost $7000.

For me its hard to go much higher than 1 cent. I mostly travel on well planned domestic tickets and rarely spend over 250. If I go to Europe I am not likely to spend more than 700 even in summer. Asia can be done for 800 or so and India for 1200. In all these situations I think I am far more likely to get my preferred dates and routing with those cash figures than with miles. In a real pinch, I might need a last minute domestic ticket for an emergency, but that raises the value on the last one or two free tix. I don't foresee 20 emergencies in the near furture. Plus you can generally find a LCC for not too much money.

Hindukid, I know where you're coming from. Although I really enjoy those C and F cabins on international flights, I cut my teeth on transcons in coach (granted, UA E+ and AA's MRTC, mostly). I don't have much of an issue sitting in coach for a long flight, and generally prefer to save the miles, especially domestically. I tend to value miles at about .01 to .011 cents each. Because of that, one thing I've done is switched my credit cards to cash rebate cards that pay 1-1.5 cents per dollar spent, which to me offer more value and flexibility than miles cards (usually with no annual fee).

Plus I've rediscovered the value of Standard Awards. To me, the best miles deal right now is UA's 40,000 miles Standard Award. Any flight, any time if there is a seat available, and the cost (according to my valuation) is generally $400 to $440 (plus security fees). With transcons often available now for well under $300, I often purchase those tickets and save the miles for Standard Awards for Thanksgiving or other holiday travel. That way I can change those travel plans almost at will. At the same time, I build up miles for those international trips that tend to be pricey.

Lack of premium cabins wouldn't make miles worth much less for me. I usually redeem for coach anyway.

An economy discount broker ticket USA-Cameroon costs $1700-$2200 on the cheapest carrier. Or 60K-100K FF miles depending on the program.

I also get a high value out of AA domestic awards. Here are four ways I have redeemed 25K awards on AA:

ORD-SNA Stopover
SNA-SFO-YVR Destination
YVR-DFW-CID Return


SNA-PDX-YVR Stopover
YVR-DFW-CID Destination
CID-ORD Return

ORD-CID
CID-ORD
Ticketed the night before I needed to travel

SNA-SFO-JFK-ORD-YYZ Stopover
YYZ-DFW-DEN Destination
DEN-DFW-SNA Return

This last ticket was special because my routing was kinda intentional because I needed to stop in ORD for about 24 hours for a meeting on the same ticket for free, without it being counted as a stopover. I ticketed to leave SNA late on day one, fly the red-eye SFO-JFK, a morning flight JFK-ORD on day 2, and then ORD-YYZ in the afternoon of day 2. My connection times were all under 24 hours so this was a legal routing (fortunately for me there wasn't anything more direct available on Day 1 to YYZ so I asked to be ticketed like this so I could standby). Then I showed up at the airport early AM on day 1 and asked to standby for the direct flight to ORD. I got on it, arrived in ORD early afternoon of Day 1, and had until the afternoon of day 2 before I had to continue to YYZ. Just what I needed. Don't count on AA letting you do what I did!

Anyhow - all of these tickets were needed - ie I would have paid cash if I didn't have miles - and would have cost $600 to $1000 on the cheapest airline in econ. (They also were all high season summer tickets)

So for me - with the types of travells I need - miles retain their value without premuim cabins!

And one of those LCCs (that has lots of flights to various places from Houston) doesn't use miles, but rather credits which are based on the number of flights, not the length of them, and gives you a free UNRESTRICTED (last minute) ticket for about every 5.3 flights (less if you also earn credits through rental cars, hotel stays, etc). The one downside is that Southwest's credits expire 12 months after you use them, so it only works if you either fly them enough or use partners enough to get 16 credits (what you need for that free flight award) within 12 months.

And then value of a credit depends a lot on whether you're likely to have a last-minute use for it or not. If you do, 16 credits is $600ish for longer flights, and that works out to around $37.50 per credit or $18.75 per half-credit. The half-credit value is useful because the MINIMUM they give for partners is a half credit, in situations like rental cars where other airlines give only 50 miles per day or Hampton Inn hotels where other airlines only give 100 miles per stay (and I doubt you can even attribute a whole SINGLE DOLLAR to the value of those 50 or 100 miles!). And even if you don't use the ticket that way, the value of a half credit is likely to still be lots more than the value of 50 or 100 miles.

But again, if you don't amass 16 Rapid Rewards credits in a year, you've got ZERO value. So depending on your situation it's likely to have either by far the highest value for all-coach domestic flying of any Frequent Flyer program, or no value at all. (Hard to think of a situation for all-coach where it would have some value, but significantly less than the mileage-based airlines, at least for some one based in a Southwest city like Houston.)

I live in CHI - a Southwest city but Southwest awards are worth far less than 25K AA miles to me. Why?

1) With the rare exeption of a last minute - every 25K AA award I redeem is when I need to go to two places, not just one. So I would need 3 SWA certs - not just two.

2) Many of the cities I go to SWA does not serve - or serves somewhere 50-100 miles away - inconvenient.


With promos, 17 RTs (many international ofcourse) on AA this year netted me about 700K miles, enough for:

- 14 non-capacity controlled awards anywhere in the USA and Canada
- 28 capacity controlled awards anywhere in the USA and Canada and I have been able to get capacity controlled seats when I want them
- 16 capaciyt controlled first awards
- many, many good international options that I have and will use miles for

My average domestic flight is 1500 miles - 3000 RT. Without any promotions netting me extra miles - 4 AA RTs (with my status bonus and online booking bonus) will give me more than enough miles for a free domestic ticket. 7 RTs give me enough miles for an non-capacity controlled domestic USA and Canada award - including many more cities than SWA flies to. With promos it gets even better.

So, in my opinion, SWA only has a good program for someone who flies short hops. For anyone who flies longer domestic - its a bad deal.

Interestingly, I am in the opposite situation, which is why Southwest works so well for me so often. Most of the cities I go to are served MAINLY by Southwest. Some of the routes I fly most frequently are flown ONLY by Southwest.

Ed

As someone who does mostly coach domestic travel, I value a mile somewhere around one cent. I don't mind coach and probably wouldn't ever redeem an award for anything higher. The only way you'll see me in C or F is with an upgrade cert or an operational upgrade. If I ever get more ambitious in my travel, however, miles may be worth more to me...

However, expiring miles a la Southwest would devalue my miles almost to nothing. I don't fly or redeem awards enough to ever earn an award if the miles keep flowing out of my account!

First, if you're in Denver, you don't have to worry about Southwest no working for you due to expiration, since Southwest doesn't come any closer than ABQ or OMA or SLC!

Second, I don't know of anyone else who does it "a la" Southwest. Southwest's program is completely different. With Southwest, your miles don't expire because you never earn any miles. You earn credits, and the same amount of credits whether you fly shorthops like LAX-LAS (which are often $75ish total round trip including all taxes and fees) or cross-country flights. Perhaps more importantly, the minimum amount they bookkeep is 0.5 credits, and you only need 16.0 credits (within 12 months) for an (automatic) free flight award (which you then have one year to book and fly). Thus the minimum they can give you for any activity is 1/32 of a free flight. (And, btw, that's a 50k award type of "unrestricted", walkup-equivalent flight except for a dozenish blackout dates a year.) So you know those rental car companies that give you a measly 50 miles per day? If they partner with Southwest (Hertz, Budget, Dollar, and Alamo do), they give at least 1/32 of a free flight per rental! You know those lower midscale hotel chains that only give 100 miles or so per stay? If they partner with Southwest (Hampton Inn's HHonors and all Marriott's except Fairfield Inn do) they give at least 1/32 of a free flight per stay! So if you do a number of rentals and/or stays a year at places that give you hardly any miles for that, Southwest may often be the ONLY thing worth earning toward (if you can avoid the expiration, of course).

Now, that certainly doesn't mean it's for everybody, but my point is that it has some major advantages that for a number of people (but far from all) compensate for the 12-month expiration. (Certainly, if I couldn't earn Southwest credtis so fast from partners, I don't know if I'd keep participating in their program, now that it takes 5.3 flights a year to keep from expiring by flying alone.)

So as you can see there can be no one "like" Southwest unless they also avoided miles for some bigger-granularity unit of measurement "a la" credits.