There are other two major advantages to award travel- the dates can be changed without penalty if the itinerary isn't changed; and, at least on Delta a free stopover is allowed that would cost a lot otherwise.This adds to the value of the award tickets.

mmgm, excellent points about advantages of award travel!. Changing dates potentially saves you about $75/ticket if you assume you would have been traveling on some type of restricted fare. Unfortunately, the date change requires that free seats be available on the new dates. The stopover option, which I think is available in most US FF programs, may save $$ as well. I'm less sure about that though. I've actually had some purchased tickets with stopovers and the cost wasn't any more (probably because the flights connected in the city I was stopping over in). Open Jaw travel on award tickets (arrving at one airport and returning from another) is permitted in a number of programs and really saves $$ too. Open Jaw travel does present problems with rental cars though.

MileKing, I just got back from Bali and I saw your question (above). About last min. travel. Just last month, I was able to get a ticket on Northwest to go to Hong Kong. I had tried booking it for months but there were no seats available. The only way to go was pay a fortune or use my miles. I booked with my miles the day before I left (I guess that is when World Perks seats finally opened up). No, I would not sit around and wait for seats to open up last minute, especially if I really had to be somewhere on a certain date. I am not a business traveler so I do not have any level of urgency when I travel. That is why I use my miles for last minute travel. I hope that helps.

Every person will value them differently, but it's a shame that it is not easier to buy/sell/trade them. For example, I value my hundreds of thousands of UA miles for very little because they never want to redeem them. However, I value SWAir tickets more highly because they are so flexible.

If you want to liquidate at a "market price", here's the skinny from www.awardtraveler.com, a FF mile broker:

"If you may want to sell air miles Award Traveler generally pays between 1.0 and 1.6 cents per mile.
For example, depending upon the airline, Award Traveler may offer you $520 for 40,000 miles; $1260 for 90,000 miles; $2250 for 150,000 miles; and $3200 for 200,000 miles.
Award Traveler also pays $240 RT for Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards Award Tickets with at least 3 months remaining before expiration."

I would be interested in someone starting a separate posting on their experiences with mileage brokers. Ethics and "airline rules" aside, I'm looking to dump a pile of miles that the monopolists won't let me otherwise use (and as MileKing stated, use the cash to buy heavily discounted airfare).

Another side point: with SWAir, 4 RTs purchased online will score a free ticket. RTs can be had on many routes for <$100.

Tino, I'm not interested in selling my miles, but thanks for the post. It is very interesting that this AwardTraveler values the miles at 1.0 to 1.6 cents/mile. The mid-point of this range (about 1.3-1.4 cents/mile) is where I would value them (at least for domestic coach travel) based on some very rough, "back of the envelope" calculations. I have to believe that no matter how you slice it, a mile's value has to be between 1.0 and 2.0 cents. At the upper end, you can buy them from the airlines for 2.0 cents each - why pay more; at the lower end, if the value of a mile is only 1.0 cents, then the airline/credit card companies/etc. are basically offering you a 1% cash back credit card (i.e. $1 charged gets you 1 cent back) in which case I would think one would rather have the cash.

You mentioned not being able to redeem miles for free travel. It can be tough, another reason for lowering a mile's value. In another post that appeared sometime ago, a newspaper man (not you Catman!) was looking for horror stories about people who couldn't claim awards. The responses from flyertalkers was that they didn't think that this was a big issue. Re-reading those posts again a few weeks ago, makes me wonder. I saw the following:

1. A number of people (PremEx comes to mind - sorry to pick on you PremEx) stated that they never claim free awards, only upgrades. Clearly, using miles for free tickets are not an issue for this group. And I can tell you that upgrades have always been easier to claim (with miles) than free tickets.
2. Those who did use miles for awards indicated that a. they planned their trips months in advance (6 months looked like the average, some longer) and b. you had to be flexible with dates and times.

Those two things, and my own experience, tell me it is indeed difficult to get the free tickets you really want. It is basically the freebie equivalent of bidding for flights on Priceline. You don't pay a lot but THEY (in this case the airlines) tell you when you are going to travel.

MileKing, pick on me all you want...I can take it! Actually that's not what I said. I do use miles for free tickets often, just not for myself. My first personal free ticket was just last month...LAX-LHR First Class.

[This message has been edited by PremEx (edited 02-16-99).]

OK, PremEx. I was going from memory on your post and obviously didn't recall things quite correctly (all that travel, I guess). In any event, if you are using the miles for free travel for others, I assume you have also encountered difficulty in getting the dates/times you (they) want. Yes?

I have claimed at least 8 free tickets (five separate itineraries) in the last 4 years. All were coach class awards on either AA, UA, or US. One ticket was to London, the rest were contiguous US (no Alaska or Hawaii). Only one was claimed on short notice (less than one month before departure). The others were planned 4-10 months ahead of time. With the exception of the one ticket claimed on short notice, all of the others required me to change my preferred travel dates or times (or both). The travel was to/from places like Spokane, Rapid City, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Las Vegas. Of this group, I would only consider Las Vegas (during convention season) as a potentially major tourist destination. (Phoenix was off-season.) If it is difficult to get the flights you really want to these destinations, even with advance planning, then I don't hold out much hope of getting free tickets to more popular places. FFs have been "conditioned" by the airlines and the media (sorry InsideFlyer) to expect changes in their preferred plans and that somehow, because the travel is free, it's OK. We'll I for one don't think it's OK - and the miles that permit the "free" travel are bought and paid for by someone. The airlines like to whine about the costs of the FF programs. Other threads have already discussed that a number of people, myself included, believe they are making money on the programs. It's time the airlines put up or shut up; make the seats available or show us the evidence that the FF programs are costing you! Enough.

the free UA-partner-award tickets for member of my family in 98/99 were all to touristic places and some even on heavy traffic dates, and all in International first class. I made the reservations about 8 months in advance.

january-98: on SUPERBOWL Friday: Zurich-Washington DC - San Francisco - Santa Ana (Orange County): I had to make the concession to fly to SNA instead of San Diego (no real problem) - San Francsco - Washington DC - Zurich.

november-98: the week before and after THANKSGIVING: Brussels - Washington DC - San Francisco - Seattle - San Francisco - Denver - Aspen - Denver - Washington DC - Brussel (I made the concession to fly from Brussels instead of Frankfurt, no problem as the free SR-ticket to Brussels costs the same amount of miles as Frankfurt).

february/march-99: Frankfurt-Chicago-Vancouver-San Francisco-Denver-Aspen-Denver-Chicago-Frankfurt (concession: detour Vancouver-San Francisco-Denver instead of direct flight Vancouver-Denver; and I was waitlisted with different possibilities for about 2 months before this segment was fine).

For travel in International First Class (with only 14 seats available in total), for only 120'000 miles in total (160'000 ./. 1K-voucher = 120'000 for 2 persons) I must say that my family feels pampered by United for the last 14 months.

In add on my october round-the-world-trip on every segment of all 5 partner-airlines the staralliance-upgrade-vouchers worked out fine (and the upgrades with miles on the UA segments too) - and the segments were popular ones: LHR-Rio, Rio-Miami-San Francisco, San Francisco-Taipeh, Taipeh-Bangkok, Bangkok-Delhi, Delhi-Copenhague, Copenhague-Zurich.

[This message has been edited by Rudi (edited 02-17-99).]

MileKing, yes I have had difficulty on about 50% of my booking attempts. But because I usually request a "saver" award, I accept (grudgingly) that I might have to make consessions as to prefered dates/times, as these have always been "capacity controlled". If it's really important, I just order a "Standard" award which gets me a free seat as long as they still have one to sell. I hate having to use more miles, but hey, that's the difference between Saver and Standard awards on United. I will give United credit though...on at least 2 occasions when I held reservations for a Standard award, I was able to change them to Savers when they released some more Saver seats later on, and got credited for the difference on the mileage .

I'm glad to see I'm not alone in having to change dates/times (or in Rudi's case location). PremEx, I wonder if your status with UA helps you get the 50% hit rate. My hit rate looks to be only 20% (if I count itineraries) or an estimated 40% if I count individual flights. Also, did UA contact you to change to the Saver award (from Standard) or did you continuously follow-up with them to get the change?

I use most of my miles for vacation first clas travel for both myself and my wife. We've never had a problem, and we do this at least once a year. She's just reached Silver Medallion on Delta in her own right, and we will now start using some of her miles, as well. I've been intrigued by the value computations done by some of you. I've never thought of it that way, but I intend to start counting.

As I said, the math loses me so I just use my own system.

But I have had to change my itineraries several times when trying to use miles to upgrade. Most recently, my business trip to Vegas. There were NO award seats for EWR but for JFK for the dates I wanted. And JFK was about 85 bucks cheaper (the company told us buy coach as first choice.) So I have to grab an earlier fight, change at IAD and come back on a red eye. But I"m saving a few bucks and am guaranteed in first.

It's going to be a long business trip so I'll be frazzled going from work to coach to meetings and more meetings and then back to coach and change planes!!! I'm not getting any younger! CATMAN

MileKing, they told me to call back occasionally, which I did.