FF Miles vs Lower Fares
 

Have just booked some overseas flights I mulled this around in my head a bit. How do you judge when paying more for a flight is worth it so you can stick with your primary (or maybe secondary, if you have two) frequent flier plan. Overseas flights are tricky and I was able to book one at a terriffic price, but I'm not sticking with my airline of choice. When I filtered through Kayak there seemed to be entirely too many cheaper airfares with better depart/arrive times, and still direct (and with carriers that aren't budget/crap).

Basically, how do you judge your price elasticity when looking at what airline to fly on?

(this post only applies to airfare that is non-reimbursable)

I usually take three things into consideration:

• The value of the redeemable miles I'd earn. This is generally the easiest part, as it's fairly easy to assign a cents-per-mile value to most redeemable miles (for me it's usually between 1.4-1.8 cents per mile depending on the airline).
• The value of the elite qualifying miles I'd earn. These are more case-specific, since it depends largely on whether I expect the trip to have a make-or-break effect on reaching an elite tier. If I know I'm going to fly 25k miles this year without booking this particular trip on my preferred airline, but I'm not going to get close to 50k, then it doesn't much matter. But if I already have 35k for the year and the overseas trip would get me in range of 50k, I might be willing to pay a couple hundred bucks extra to go with the preferred airline.
• The value of elite perks for flying on my preferred airline. I'll often pay slightly more to take a Skyteam carrier--even on int'l trips where I know I'm not going to get upgraded--because I should have access to better seats in coach and should have some priority in rebooking if there are irregular ops.

Ultimately it's a very subjective and case-specific calculus. I'm pretty cheap, and will go with a nonpreferred carrier to save a couple hundred bucks--unless I know it's going to make or break my elite qualification this year. If I knew I wasn't going to get elite status or elite benefits, however, my price sensitivity would increase even more, because the redeemable miles alone are of relatively little value to me.

Sometimes (well, ok -- often) status does not come without pain. What's your threshold ?? ;)

This is like asking, "What is the meaning of life?"

Maybe if you provide some specifics about yourself, your budget, and what you want out of your flying experience, a meaningful discussion can be had.

That said, for the majority of active FTers I suspect gaining/maintaining status with a single carrier generally trumps price.

I know my own threshold, and in this particular case the difference was about 300 dollars per ticket to switched to a prefered carrier, which for me was to rich.

However, I was wondering what OTHER people have as considerations. For me, unless the difference is neglible, I don't bother actually checking my redemption values etc.

Elite status etc is a good consideration, and one I probably don't think of enough. Any others?

Of course if you are already Elite on your preferred airline, one may choose to fly with them even at premium to gain the elite benefits on that particular flight - eg upgrades, priority check-in, lounge access or whatever. Again, the value of this is hard to judge - probably worth more in Y than C/F as you get most of these anyway when flying C/F - even on greatly discounted fares.

I get the impression that you do not understand how much some of us value elite status. To frequent flyers other than the uber rich (who can just buy an F ticket and status be damned) status is everything!

Now if one is not a frequent flyer then it really is irrelevant whose bus one rides in the back of. Sure, some carriers provide a better economy product than do others but the infrequent flyer propably would not notice. In this case simply shop price/convenience.

FF Miles vs. Lower Fares
 

I make it my practice to always fly my preferred carrier for international flights when the difference in fare is $300 or less. The extra mileage and elite perks far outweigh any marginal dollar difference.

The question then becomes: What dollar amount do you consider "marginal"? For me, $300 is too much, especially since I usually buy two tickets when I'm paying (I usually travel with my wife when I go places for leisure). A marginal cost difference that I would be comfortable paying to fly my preferred airline would be more like $50.

Ed

Like with many FTers, status is very important indeed to me.
If I can find a ticket on my airline/alliance of choice for a price that I consider reasonable, I am not even interested in what the competition charge.

What's a reasonable price? Well, my subjective definition of it would be as follows (prices inclusive of all taxes and charges):
Up to about €0.12 for shorthaul Y, €0.20 for shorthaul C, €0.08 for longhaul Y and €0.25 for longhaul C. I am not really interested in flying F, so I haven't got a number for that. :p

These are on a basis of one-way for each mile of distance between my origin and destination points (nothing to do with FF miles or the actual route taken).
If I want a stopover, I'm obviously prepared to pay a bit more.

When my airline/alliance are charging more than the above prices, I will look into what the competition have to offer before making a decision. If they're cheaper than my preferred carriers by 20% or more, the business goes to them.

The calculation for me is something like this:

Preferred carriers: cost of ticket minus value of miles earned (which can be a lot with the elite bonus)

Non-preferred carriers: cost of ticket plus cost of MR needed to make up for lost EQM

I have yet to encounter a situation where it was sufficiently cheaper to fly a non-preferred carrier on a revenue ticket versus a preferred carrier.

My elite status is on hiatus while I am in graduate school. (Not entirely true -- I locked in Silver for 08 long before classes started, but my flying has been cut to zilch, save some international award travel, as long as classes are in session.)

When I was in Los Angeles, the uber-priority goal was ensuring that my flying miles would get credited to my Northwest WP account. All of my flying was domestic. That left me three airlines to chose from -- NW, DL, and CO. The only exceptions to the rule was some intra-CA and LAS travel -- I'd take WN for those. Delta didn't serve those routes until later, but still, for those short flights, I wasn't missing many miles.

So, for wherever I was going, I'd look at NW first. If they gave me a decent price, I looked no further. If I didn't like the price, I'd look second at DL and third at CO. Those two are an interesting tradeoff -- DL doesn't upgrade NW flyers, and CO only gives 50% EQM on cheap fares, but allows upgrades. Frankly, I'd almost always take the full EQM over the upgrade.

Anyway, as a Plat out of LAX, at the times I flew, I was all but certain my upgrades would clear. I only missed one or two segments over the two years I was Plat. So, the fact that I would fly in F was worth something to me -- IIRC, if NW was less than $100 more than DL, I'd fly NW.

I think the only times I flew an alternate skyteam carrier were my trips LAX-DEN (an MSP connection didn't make much sense, and I don't think they would sell it to me anyway) and a trip to ATL (incidentally, where I ended up on CO.)

So, for those years, I lucked out -- never did I take a trip depressed about not getting status and miles.

Those FF miles I earned are definitely worth something, and are actually usable. I've booked a handful of trips over the years, and have always gotten saver tickets at the times I wanted. I've even gotten WBC saver seats over the Pacifc. In fact, I'm traveling to China in two weeks, and got a rt WBC Saver ticket.

Save for an around the world ticket, saver WBC are the best values in the house. A WBC seat is pricing out at over 10 times the coach fare, but only twice the miles. I'm a big guy; I appreciate the seat.

For business I used to pick the best flight based on schedule, or more recently, the government contract carrier. So over the years I have accumulated significant mileage balances on all the airlines. As airlines merge this becomes less of an issue, e.g. AA now includes my TWA and PanAm miles, and I suspect my orphan NW miles will soon be part of another program (CO were all laundered thru Amtrak :) ).

With that prologue - I would answer your question by saying that for leisure travel I usually go with the lowest price, unless there is some special perk (i.e. E+ or my WN companion pass) that tips the scale. That being said I can usually find a price that is fairly competitive on a good routing from my preferred carriers.

Depending on the flight, I would consider paying $20-100pp extra to avoid bad schedules or connections on carriers where I don't have (or want status). Any higher amount would be hard to justify. Fortunately I rarely seem to find this situation as the connections for NW, CO and CL are usually inferior to the schedules offered by UA, AA and WN from SFO/OAK. Of course, YMMV depending on your location.

This never has seemed to me to be an in depth enough question that mathematical formula are needed. That said, what you're essentially trying to do is quantify the opportunity cost of the cheaper ticket. Once you do so, buying the cheaper ticket would only make sense if the cost savings were greater than the opportunity cost.

You'd essentially need to figure out the following:

Your average value of redeemable airline miles. What is the general cent/mile value of the miles you redeem. Flying on your preferred carrier, if you have status already, will mean that you get more of these miles per mile flown so you'd have to factor that in and also the time value of any delay in redemption of miles on another carrier. This is assuming that you will fly said carrier again enough times to redeem the miles. This could also influence the value you give to the miles of this alternate carrier.

Value of status - There is a material value to status in this and the next calendar year. Getting to another level of status that you would not have gotten to or getting there sooner, will mean additional redeemable miles as a bonus. Also, getting to another level of status gives you a mileage bonus for all of next year.

Value of benefits - You'd want to put some value on the benefit of premium seat selection, lounge access (where applicable), etc. You'd also want to account for time not spent in the security and ticketing lineups.

You'd basically use those inputs to calculate the opportunity cost. That said, it's not rocket science and given where you are in your program. what status you have and what status you likely will have at the end of the year, it should be a pretty easy decision that doesn't need an equation drawn up.

this has been very hard for me. example: i told someone i would give them 3 tickets lax-dfw and was going to use my miles or wells fargo points. but when the price went from around $600 ea to $825 for all 3...i just bought them. I would have used 75k miles/points when, in fact, i just used 90k on united (via air-china anf thai) for a business/frist class ticket from lax - chaing mai for a friend. clearly 90k miles for a $10,000.00 ticket is a good use of miles. last year i used 125k aa miles for a 1st class lax-lhr a $13,000.00 dollar ticket. that same 125k miles would have got me 5 tickets lax-dfw or i could have paid $1375.00 for the tickets. my way is i vaule 100k miles at around $10,000.00. and 100k points around $5,000.00. i will very rarely use 2x miles or standard awards. thank God, if i need to do this i have a friend with 6 million delta miles and he lets me use his. i hope this helps.