You think that was derision. Man oh man you colonials are thin skinned

No, I think that was a negation of the point about "no one is saying anything bad about using miles for long-haul Y."

No, and the OP has never been hit for $500 in taxes and fees on a ticket that otherwise would cost him $400.

Are you implying that an award ticket would actually cost you more than paying for the same ticket with cash? If you are flying BA, for example, you will pay the same taxes and fees whether you get the flight on miles or for cash. There are no savings when you pay cash for the ticket.

I laughed so hard when I read this as I couldn't possibly agree more. And the benefits of top tier status are a big value to consider when choosing to pay Y all the time (for the EQM) and just use points for upgrades.

Bringing the kids along is another excellent use of points.

travelmad, I invite you to read deeper on the BA board and find countless examples of people finding all-in fare specials for less than the fees and surcharges which one pays for award tickets. For that matter one can find recent examples on the Delta board of similar phoenomena (or within $50).

Can you point to a few of these examples? I am asking in all seriousness. I am trying to imagine how this would be possible for the routes and purposes that I am using award tickets for (a few of my BA award trips in the last couple of years: PHL-SOF/BUC-PHL, PHL-ATH-MAD-PHL, PHL-INV-PHL). My goal is not just to get to Europe, but to get to a specific destination for a specific date, and to get there and back quickly. I am not able to choose my vacations based on what fare sales are available. I imagine most people are in the same boat.

The reason this can happen is BA does not have one single universal fuel surcharge applied 100% of the time on a given route. Fare sales sometimes come with lower than usual fuel surcharges, resulting in the fuel surcharges applied to the award ticket making the award ticket more expensive than a paid ticket.

This should be illegal, IMO.

I would go even further and make fuel surcharges existing more than 3 months after a fuel price hike illegal.

Yawn. You did get the part when in my first post I said that the OP's premise was WRONG because people thgought using them for Y on DOMESTICS or inter-Europe was a stupid deal, right? (His premise being that we all think that ALL Y redemptions are bad). Anyway, I have no idea what INV pricing is like, nor do I care to look into it, however BA has had three multiweek fare sales in as many months so I do not think they would be that hard to come by.

You are of course ignoring the central point of my last post, which is that for myself and many others, travel planning is NOT driven by what temporary fare sales are available at any given time. Sure, I could find a fare sale to INV at some random point during the year. But does that short-term sale correspond with the dates that I need to travel? Almost always, the answer is no. Simply saying that there have been fares of less than X for a given route at some moment in history does not make your point.

Please right now go to ba.com and see what prices you can get on a variety of short and mid haul flights 21 days in the future in Economy class, then price out the fees, etc for doing a redemption. Then report back please.

As I have never needed to do a short/mid-haul flight on BA without a TATL attached, this doesn't have any relevance to me. Also, since I don't have any vacation plans to make right now, when fare sales are at their most extreme, the fact that there happen to be fare sales right now is also completely irrelevant. I refer you back to my previous post and ask you to actually think about what I wrote.

For the Nth time, the answer to the original question is "to each his own." There is no single approach that makes the most sense for every traveler.

And what you repeatedly do not get is that the OP's original premise was:

"I would just like to address this common fallacy that using your FF miles for economy fares is not getting the best value out of them"

and then he went on to talk about TATL examples (much like yourself).

My premise has been that the argument is flawed because it has never been a common fallacy around FT, perhaps in the OP's mind, or yours, however the common thought on FT (which is where we are and which is perhaps the greatest repository of FF knowledge on the planet) has in fact been that they are a poor value for domestic or "short haul" flying vs. long haul flying unless there is a compelling reason to use them for such (last minute business/emergency/death/whatever).

No relevence to you? Doesn't really matter as in fact you keep skewing the argument towards something which I both never meant nor ever intended, I also doubt it would not apply to Luanda either, but no one was talking of such.

The fact remains that unless one has a very compelling reason to do so, one will find that using miles for short or mid haul travel is generally a poor proposition.

It also depends on WHERE you choose to burn your RDMs. For example, flying US domestic, there are lots of choices, all within a general level of service (no real LCCs flying, except for WN, which is kind of one). If I need to fly to New York for a bowl of ramen and a pastrami sandwich, I have several choices to pay for a flight. Generally it is unlikely that I will burn 25/50K RDMs for a flight when I can purchase a flight and accrue EQM or points on whatever airline I wind up on.

However, when I'm in Singapore, eating chili crab and roti prata, flying inter-Asia can get ridiculous (SQ)or hella cheap (AK, 3K, etc). I'm not going to pay for a flight to HKG (where I can have the best wontonmein and dim sum) that will cost the same price as my SFO-SIN flight, purchased Economy but usually SWUd. Then again, if I fly the LCCs, no status means no lounge and luggage restrictions. But I can burn 30K RDMs for C (or 20K for Y) on SQ. To me that's leveraging value! And gets me into the SKL!

As the Jedi say, "it depends on your point of view"

my mistake...