Was just wondering what your worst-ever use of miles for a ticket was?

I booked a r/t ticket for me and a 1-way ticket for my 4 y.o. daughter PHL-MCO later this month so that I could take my daughter to my sister's where she will visit for about 12 days. I fly back by myself several days later. Didn't initially book wifey b/c of the cost. Now that we are getting close to the trip, my wife is concerned that 2 weeks will be a long time away from our daughter. So, thought of getting an award ticket on US. Best I could do is 25,000 miles down and 12,500 miles return. US will charge $80 for the ticket...$50 for being less than 14 days (or whatever their cutoff is), then $5 for something, and $25 for something else. I would also need to purchase another 1,000 miles (actually only need 491) at a cost of $25. So basically my cost is $105 plus 37,500 for a $295 ticket (getting wifey on the same flight on which my daughter and I are already booked). Normally, I would just buy the $295 ticket, but money is tight right now so thinking of spending the miles and $105 to get my wife on the flight.

The other factor, which can't exactly be measured in monetary terms, is that we have, through my brother-in-law who works at Disney, free access to Magic Kingdom/Epcot/etc. Our daugther is at a perfect age for a trip to the "Magic Kingdom" which would be a lot of fun; but I wouldn't want to take her there myself without my wife. So, there is "value" of sorts in having us all make the trip to Orlando.

So, basically I'm using 37,500 miles to cover $195 worth of ticket; I know! Terribly inefficient use of miles!

So, what is YOUR terribly inefficient use of miles story?

Cheers,
HalfSwede

As the OP is asking about award travel, I'll move this to our MilesBuzz forum. Ocn Vw 1K, Moderator, TravelBuzz.

I recently booked a economy ticket to London for 75000 miles + $200 for a $1750 ticket. Granted that off-peak tickets to London can be had for $800, but this was a last minute emergency thing.

So 75000 miles for $1550, not terrible but quite bad at around 2 cpm redeemed value.

I spent 37,500 for a ticket to Iowa last summer for a friend's wedding. Could have purchased it for about $350, but just didn't want to spend the cash.

We just used 150,000 AA miles for 3 domestic roundtrips for relatives to come to Calif from the east coast on standard awards. There were no saver awards on any airline for the dates they wanted to come and the tickets would have been about $500 per person.

We don't fly AA much but had accumulated the miles through several cycles of credit card offers, had little other use for the miles, and therefore didn't see the point of spending $1500.

This is an example of why I am not so concerned about the lack of availability of saver award space. Yes, you need to spend more miles but you can also get them so much more easily. Inflation on both sides of the equation.

I used 50,000 NW miles to fly my then long distance gf from Boston to Phoenix for her first visit to me. She dumped me three days after she left.

That wins the "worst use" prize for sure...ouch!

Who knows, might have been a bargain in the long run...

Therapists, Psychiatrists and Divorces can be expensive!!

Probably a round trip YYC-LGA / TPA-YYC on NWA a while back. But, I was upgraded to F for TPA-YYC, so I can't consider that too bad of a deal for the 20,000 miles I spent on it after 5 K delay compensation.

Actually, I think my recent YYC-COS round trip on UA for 20K was a bad deal. But hey, it was only 20 K.

I guess I don't really have a closet full of bad redemption experience.

My BEST redemption was YYC-DFW(stopover)-EZE (stopover) - Iguazu Falls (open jaw) / Punta Arenas Chile - Santiago (stopover) - DFW (stopover) - YYC for 40,000 miles.

My AAgent was a bit clueless Re: stopover rules! Man I wish I could go back to that!

I got a roundtrip ticket from TXL-LHR-HGK on CX and BA for 85.000 asia miles where the LHR HKG I could have gotten for under 400 Euros.

A few years ago, before I really got into this FF thing, I used a 15K reduced mileage award to fly LGA-YYZ. But when I wanted to fly to CDG a couple of months later I was about 10K miles short for an award ticket. I have no recollection of what the fares were but I was certainly out more cash for the Paris ticket than I would have been for Toronto.

That's almost exactly $0.005/mile, which is what the redemption rate is for many of the cash-equivalent awards in the Amex Membership Rewards program. I always thought that those were a terrible redemption rate, but assumed that some people must redeem for them because the Amex catalog is full of them.

To answer your question, I think your redemption is on the low end of things, but certainly people have done worse.

I burnt my last 45,000 DL miles on a domestic F ticket on a 757. LGA-ATL-GNV roundrip (757 only LGA-ATL of course)

At the time I was so frustrated with delta that I decided to burn the miles and abandon skyteam. The trip was so awful that I regretted not just buying an economy ticket on US Air connecting in Charlotte, which would have avoided DL domestic F, the DL terminal at LGA, and ATL- all of which are infernal.

I should have sat on those miles, as they could have gone towards an int`l first or business class award someday.

I will never use miles ever again for anything but upgrades, or int`l first and business class awards. I don`t find value in domestic redemptions- I`d rather pay cash and earn miles.

My worst use of miles was letting all my US miles expire. Oh wait, maybe that was my best use of miles...

25,000 miles for $500+ ticket isn't a bad deal in my book. Especially when you're sitting on half a million miles, the trip is only 800 miles each way (or 350 for SFO-SBA), and you already have top-tier status locked up.

Whether or not domestic redemptions make sense will depend largely upon the person and their travel plans.

Since all of my travel is leisure travel and paid for out of pocket, spending 25,000 miles for an upgrade from NRT to JFK has much more value to me than a domestic Y award ticket.

As someone without half a million miles, and no status to speak of on any airline, I use what miles I do have carefully.