Is it me or is it pointless to collect miles?
 

I've got 270,000 UR points, which I thought would be good for something. Turns out, they are almost good for a single business class round trip ticket to Europe this summer, plus $600. I know that I don't know much about hunting around for award flights, and that airlines probably deliberately make it difficult to do so, but this seems like a case of "what's the point". Not very useful for a couple wanting to get a couple of business class fares. Am I missing something? Or did I just have unrealistic expectations?

It's you. :D

Seriously, trying to get premium-cabin seats on certain routes during high-demand seasons is often challenging.

You'll want to avoid redeeming through British Airways because of their hefty carrier surcharges. But Iberia -- which is also a UR transfer partner -- has more modest surcharges when you travel on IB metal. Have you checked availability with IB?

My personal opinion is that since I only fly for leisure, I am not going to fly enough to get a lot of point redemptions. When I get them I enjoy them. But I am not choosing the carrier for that reason. But I am going to use them when I can. Collect them? Not really.

I don't fly enough to get status. My AA Platinum was an anomaly, and I am going to free fall to no status at the end of this month.

I get a lot more out of hotel points and hotel status.

But, when the planets align, and I finally get enough points to score one J class TATL, I am pretty excited. Which has happened exactly once.

Besides that, I usually just use them for some economy domestic redemptions. I somehow accumulated enough United miles (14K) to buy a needed one way economy trip from Denver to Cleveland this summer. It saved me a few hundred dollars and I got them by flying a TATL on Air Canada. So, take the wins when you can.

I'll jump on a Southwest flight in a second if it is cheaper than a legacy airline. And I earn and use those points too.

I think they sell you on the big score and then set up too many obstacles to get to the big score.

Heh, thanks. I had been looking on KLM's website for AF/KLM redemptions. At least it showed me results. Iberia's website just kept saying that nothing was available until I entered Madrid as a destination...and then it said the lone IB flight was not available but showed me a bunch of BA flights.

It used to (even just a few years ago) be way simpler and more worthwhile.

For a domestic roundtrip, 25k miles was the "saver" (off-peak) price and 50k miles was the "anytime" (peak) price.

Now it's routine for DL domestic awards to price in the hundreds of thousands of miles.

It's you. For 240k UA points (transferable from your UR), you can get two round trip business class seats from North America to Europe.

Yes you have to do searching and work what you can with availability and this has certainly been made more difficult over the last few years, but you can still get lots of value if you learn the system and work it.

I'm planning a trip to Barcelona this summer, so I used that to check prices. A single business class round trip is $3600. How much did it cost you for the points worth $3000?

fwiw, I'm flying my entire family of 4 for fewer points and less money. The horror is we need to read, listed to music and sleep in a smaller seat for abut 8 hours.

IMO, ALMOST pointless. I'm single so the cost of a Business Class TATL trip isn't as catastrophic as it is when a couple or a family of 4 is traveling. I choose based on whatever airline has the best price and itinerary and hasn't had bad headlines lately. So, I end up with small piles of points on a few airlines. Typically they accumulate faster on AA because I have LT Gold status and I use them when it makes sense for the free checked bags, etc. I just got the AA MC for the sign-on bonus and because the "pile" was getting big enough that adding a sign-on bonus would get me very close to a Business Class TATL to Europe. I may drop that card and do that with DL (about 50,000 miles in the account) next.

I'd thought of trying to use miles to Australia in Business. What a joke. My brother, who still flies a lot on business, managed to get tickets for my SIL to accompany him on a business trip there. For 400,000 miles. Same for Hawaii. I just booked Hawaii and paid for it outright because the number of miles they wanted was so crazy.

Oh, for the days of the old Northwest "write fly" certificates!

That gives you 8 nights in Paris at the Vendome...that's worth about 5K...correction, about 7K.

I just flew to Europe for the first time in years...going there I redeemed for business, going back I paid for coach. While it certainly is much nicer flying business, it is not worth it, IMHO. I had no issue flying coach. And this was from LAX to CDG. Take some Xanax, crash, get a massage the next day and a great meal...you'll save thousands and have a great time.

Did you try every single one of the CUR transfer partners?
Did you check to see what it would cost just to purchase tickets using points on the CUR travel site?
Did you check to see if you could use them for hotels instead, thus allowing more room in your budget for airfare?

Doesn't sound like you've investigated the full versatility of these points. At any rate, I'll take them if you don't want them anymore.

Same, ish. I just can't justify J/F to Europe. I'll just build it so I fly from the east coast, so either PHL/JFK, it's short enough that I don't want to spend double the miles, especially with how cheap cash Y fares are nowadays. I'll save my miles to fly J to Asia which is twice the length.

Judging by the amount of people who are active in these forums, I would imagine most people find some use in collecting miles/points.

How much use you get out of miles is largely dependent on your travel and spending patterns. It is also about having the right expectations. You are not likely to get multiple F/J Tickets per year without some serious effort or a ton of flying. For relatively little effort I manage to earn a long haul J ticket around every 18 months which is fine for me considering I don't ever fly for business.

It depends on what your expectations are. I travel quite a bit for business and collect the miles, our travel policy is all economy. By saving up my miles, I can usually manage to upgrade to business every few trips, which for me is well worth it.

I travel quite a bit overseas, all my miles I use for my wife and I to take a trip to a country we have never been to. (J/F)
We have 3 credit cards linked to hotel chains, so our trip , usually around 7 to 9 days, the airfare is free (expect tax etc) and the hotels are free (expect some tax)
so our only expense is food and transport within the country we are visiting
Its a nice way to see the world and not spend a lot of cash...

It's you. Miles still offer good value even in economy and sometimes incredible value.

I am traveling today from the US to India, stopping over in Japan, 60K points + $42 of fees all in business class

Not pointless for me. I presently have several upcoming international J bookings with an advanced purchase, un-inflated for effect, retail value of just over $21,000.00 which I used 611K miles and $1800 to book.. This is not quite double of my usual annual mileage bookings as I'm taking a couple of extra people. This was mostly planned well in advance (10 months) and as is often the case, the ticket availability determined, in part, my travel dates. If I wanted to book my same flights now, It would be well north of a million miles with some legs unavailable.

Back in the first decade of the century I redeemed to take the family to Oz three times in business. That era is over. Either the seats aren't available, or the "price" would be more than a million miles per trip. If anyone still thinks they can earn miles flying a modest number of paid trips for two or three years, then easily end up in J or F to Australia, they are kidding themselves; the airlines tease great things when hawking credit cards with big bonuses, but the big aspirational redemptions are actually rare and take hard work and compromise.

People who fly a very high number of paid premium trips, usually using OPM, can earn a flood of miles that will get them to the Seychelles, stretched out in 2A, clutching Champagne. For most of the rest of us today's miles accumulation rate means an occasional free segment to visit Mom in the nursing home in Syracuse in January, saving ourselves $150 or $200. It is still not entirely pointless to collect miles, but the average flyer should think of them as CVS reward points -- a minor spiff that one day will get you $2 off a bottle of Listerine, not a new smart TV.

The FF programs were conceived to change your behavior and reward your loyalty. Now they are just profit engines. At this (waning) stage of the programs, the average flyer will often find it pointless to modify his/her behavior to show loyalty to an airline. They spend more in the process, pursuing evanescent rewards, than the rewards turn out to be worth.

In my particular case, only 20% of the miles I used were from flying, the rest were transferable credit card rewards from my day to day spending not MS.

Yes, that's one way to do it (and it helped push me into Million-Mile status for Lifetime Gold before AA changed it to count only actual miles flown). Now, though, most of my spending goes on a Fidelity Visa- 2% cash back on everything and the cash goes straight into my travel budget, meaning I can choose whatever airline I want. I use dmy AA MC enough to get the sign-on bonus and now I use it only for gas, restaurants and airfares on AA, all of which give you 2 miles per $ spent. I look for the highest return on my credit card spending (I pay in full every month so don't care about finance and other charges) and airline miles generally aren't it.

My favorite "score" during that time was rescuing 100,000 miles that were in DH's account from expiring by buying a $15 iTunes gift card off the AA.com portal. (Gift cards don't always qualify for points but this did.) We later used those miles to fly to Spain in Business Class.

Bet we couldn't do that again.

There is a great value in that, not having to play tiddlywinks with your calendar to get flights. I generally try to look for 3%+ return when cashing in points for flights. I do use bonus offers and such to pad the account, but never buy just to get them. It also helps that my wife and I both have businesses and run a good part of them through credit cards.

There is clearly better value in transferring the UR points to a partner airline to get award flights, but as you noted, you need to do a lot more research. Personally, we use our UR points to offset costs on tickets for the family instead of looking for airline award tickets. As noted, you can use them for hotels as well through the UR portal. I'm currently looking to do a middle-east trip with the family and will look for award tickets on UA, but if I can't find them, we can use UR points to offset half of PE tickets allowing us to fly PE and pay about the same as regular economy. It's all in how much effort you want to spend on finding the better value. In either case, the cost of the miles (UR annual fee) is much less than the value I'm getting for the points.

I see it as a hobby with benefits. I personally enjoy the challenge of putting it all together. I have visited places I didn't start out intending to because I could get award flights to or from there. The marketing of miles and awards creates unrealistic expectations for the average person with relatively inflexible holidays. I'm fortunate in that I have the ability to adjust my schedule, making award flights totally viable and relatively easy. I start with a general geographical area I want to visit and search options. I've booked over 30 international J&F award flights over the last 5 years, but it often required adjustments and detours from where I was initially headed. I've received tens of thousands of dollars of value and feel a little bit like I'm "sticking it to the man" doing it.

FFPs have tightened their belts considerably in the last decade or two.

There was a time when the average leisure flyer could pick up a few credit cards and take the family round the world in J every year. Those days are gone and they are not coming back.

That said, it is still worth collecting miles, certainly on spend that you are already committed to. I generally do not change my spending patterns solely for the purpose of collecting miles and points. But I do grab what I can if it costs me nothing.

As for redemptions, finding 2 x J-Class Super Saver seats to the exact airport you want, on the exact day that you want, with the airline you want is very rarely a realistic prospect. However, if you can fly a few days earlier, to somewhere vaguely near your destination, then fill in the gap, you're in business.

Hypothetical example:

Person A: I want to go to Rome in Business Class on Lufthansa on the 12th and come back on the 18th. Oh dear, no seats. These miles are useless.

Person B: Hmmm...TAP has a couple of J seats to Lisbon on the 9th. Maybe we could enjoy a couple of days there, then catch a cheap flight onward. Coming back is difficult...but LOT has availability via a one-day stop in Warsaw. Let's go for it.

Person A forks over $6,000 and complains that his miles are useless.

Person B enjoys three cities for less than the price of one.

My own style is to pick up the cheapest possible cash fares, get what miles I can from credit cards, etc, and use them to fill in the gaps. In the 6 years since I semi-retired, I have been flying all over the place on error fares and special deals, while using the miles to buzz around Europe for £17.50 and around the USA for $5.60.

You know the mantra for using miles... be flexible and plan ahead.
Most of our trips are booked well in advance with no issues, because we're flexible. But, recently I had locked in dates and a locked in destination and the darn AA business class r/t ticket to Europe cost me 240K points for one seat! That was a memorable, in a bad way....

It might be worthwhile for you to pay someone knowledgeable to find a good redemption. See this thread -
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trav...e-reviews.html

most award travelers are either flexible or travel so much it doesnt matter

so those who are looking for specific dates have to hope for last minute

I just used 131,000 UR points to fly 4 of us from NYC to London on Delta buying on the Chase CSR portal. If I had transferred to Delta I don't think I could have gotten 2 tickets.

Which is why I'd never exchange UR points for Delta's SkyPesos. Look into American or United instead.

You are buying revenue Delta tickets via Chase, but I understand the point. Virgin Atlantic is a good option to redeem Delta flights with very little fees.

If it really bothers you, I'd be glad to take the burden of tracking and managing all of those useless miles off your hands. I'll even book all the flights to use your points by myself.

You could also do what I've always done - get a 2% cash back card and you'd have, I assume, several thousand dollars in cash instead.

Good, since you can't do that anyway.

Not pointless.

I have a Europe trip for 5 people this summer booked with a mix of miles and cheap tickets. Taking advantage of the tail end of the off-peak Aer Lingus calendar to get ORD-DUB one-way for 13,000 Avios per person. Best part: the junk fees are only six dollars per ticket (plus some legit taxes). Coming back on TAP with a stopover in Lisbon.

Still planning on getting an early 2020 ticket on CX in J using AS miles. We have date and route flexibility so cautiously optimistic that we'll get that one booked in the next 60-90 days.

Actually have a few DL awards booked at 5,500 to 7,500 miles per ticket in the ~2cpm range. I don't have status on DL, am not chasing it, and won't ever have the miles to do long-haul F with them, so I just take small awards when I can get them. For all of Delta's warts, they seem content to allow members to redeem on the cheap end.

Just finished up 2 years using the hell out of a Southwest Companion Pass.

Have done multiple nice Marriott/SPG, Hyatt, and Hilton awards in the past year. Have more scheduled in 2019. Hilton is frustrating in that they devalue and then shower us with ever-more points, but you can still work the game if you pay attention.

The game evolves. But it's not pointless.

You have to do a lot of work. If you don't know anything, you have to read for hours to even know where to begin.
There are award services that will help you find and book, and fees are reasonable (well, in the hundreds. Depending on how valuable your time is, and whether you find award searching fun).

As someone who just managed to find four Delta C+ award tickets so family could come down from PIT during peak summer tourism season for 94K TOTAL, (standard economy was 18K a ticket but BIL is 6'4") I'm rolling my eyes at the bit of hyperbole. And know I couldn't have done better with the United/AA option because I'm not going to find four saver award tickets on the same regional jet flight they use into here compared to Delta's mainline options.

As others have said, flexibility is the key and deals are often still out there; you just have to put more effort into finding them.

If there's any possibility I might have to cancel or change my plans (due to weather, or whatever), I make sure I buy those tickets with points. This is for non-refundable domestic coach seats, not F or Business and not to Europe obviously. Bailed me out big time when I kept cancelling and then re-booking a Florida trip a few years ago; tropical storms wanted to rain on me every date I picked.

I don't find miles useful for flying. I do use them for hotel rooms - and those you can still get in exchange for miles without paying fees.

wg

Yes, but that's part of the issue. They've made it much harder and less flexible. Last August I was looking for award travel on AA in October, DSM to ORD, at the lowest redemption level. Didn't have to be a weekend, preferred not to take 6:30 AM or late-night flights since I was traveling with my 4-year old granddaughter for a quick overnight at the Hilton ORD, just to see how it went. I wanted to pay in one direction, redeem in the other, didn't matter which direction was which.

I found ONE pair of days during October when I could make it work with those criteria and of course it involved a lot of searching and clicking and charting the results.

Really- for Des Moines to Chicago, two months out? It's not like I wanted to go to Orlando during Christmas break. The good news is that we had a blast!