Greetings FT.

Poking around SPG, I learned of their Nights and Flights redemption option. Essentially, 70k SPG gets you 5 nights in a cat4 (valued at 40k SPG) and 50k miles on any airline with which they have a 1:1 exchange ratio. This essentially converts to 30k SPG = 50k airline miles. Using the regular transfer method and their special bonus, these 1:1 airlines actually redeem at 1:1.25 (if you transfer in 20k increments). However, 1:1.25 is dwarfed by 1:1.66.

So I'm wondering (without spending the ages it would take to design comparable award tickets), if anyone has a feeling for the value of one (or, say, 50k) native points on each of the following airline's programs.

ANA vs. Asiana vs. Lufthansa vs. Singapore vs. Thai vs. US Airways

Appreciate your thoughts! -xj

Very interesting question, which has a very complex answer, IMO. It really comes down to each person's perception of value. For example, if you fly UA regularly, and want to upgrade, you will obviously get the best deal with UA miles, but that kinda goes without saying.

That being said, I find the overall cost with UA and US to be excellent for awards, especially compared to some of the partners. They tend to charge less miles for the same route, based on what I have seen, but maybe someone can correct me there. Again, I can only really speak from UA, but I find great availability overall on the Star carriers, so it is rewarding in that sense.

So I would say that UA provides an excellent value assuming you want to redeem for awards as opposed to upgrade on a certain airline.

Interesting. SPG has a redemption ratio of 1:1 with US, but it's a horrific 2:1 with UA. I'll have to do more research into US's redemption levels. That might be a good way of making the most of my points, next time I redeem 5 night at a cat4 (Aspen, anyone? )

This question can be made more interesting/difficult by asking: what is a great award (SQ's EWR-SIN in F, LH's LAX-FRA in F, etc.) that would be very hard for a regular *G to get, but that an SQ or LH GM might be able to get with "native" miles.

So if it would be 120k UA (which SPG thinks is worth 240K SPG) for an SQ F award to SIN, but that's almost impossible to get -- but it would only be 150k SQ FFMs (valued by SPG at 150k SPG) and easier to get...

You get the drift.

EWR-SIN doesn't have F, but from what I hear even C is very difficult to obtain on that flight.

IME, SQ tends to release one seat on that flight for each flight for the Star Alliance award network. Sometimes additional seats open up closer to departure.

So then I'd be curious how easy it would be as an SQ GM with the required number of native miles to get a seat on that flight. Do people know if SQ is the stingiest with their *A award seats vs internal SQ FF award seats?

Not in my experience.

Care to expand?

Does SQ offer more seats to its FFs than to *A? What about Asiana, ANA, Thai, LH, US?

I haven't had problems redeeming awards on SQ using miles of various FFPs. Of course I am also not looking for 4 F seats on the same flight - that would be expecting too much.

When I was monitoring SQ F award availability HKG-SFO it seemed that they always dumped the seats 2 to 3 days before the departure. This worked for me but it is not for faint hearted.

I have miles on several programs and it seems that F awards are very good value on US based programs if you can get them.

remember the days when it wasnt?

Anyway, for me, it also depends on what airline and how I am flying.

MM

Here is a comparison of North American rewards for all of the airlines (and more) that you listed except for Thai:

http://www.rewardscanada.ca/narewards.html

Note that charts for other regions are in the works.

That's great! Thanks

Here is the chart for flights to the Caribbean, Central America, Hawaii and Mexico
http://www.rewardscanada.ca/cahamxrewards.html