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> Consumer website estimate that in the best of case, a mile is equal to $0.01, Can you give a source for this? I've definitely gotten much better value out o

> Consumer website estimate that in the best of case, a mile is equal to $0.01, Can you give a source for this? I've definitely gotten much better value out of my miles than this (though not always). And I'm talking about normal coach fare, not wasting miles on first class tickets that only seems like a good deal because the list price is so exorbitant.

balls187 10y ago
Delta charges $0.035 a mile. http://www.delta.com/buygftxfer/displayBuyMiles.action http://www.delta.com/buygftxfer/displayBuyMiles.action
- jessriedel 10y ago
  What they sell miles for only gives you a soft upper bound on what miles are worth.
vmarsy 10y ago
I added a link to my original post, it varies by companies, delta is estimated at $0.012 apparently those days.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  I don't think "~1%" is a fair summary of that link, especially not "in the best case". You're trying to breakdown what happens to a 4% fee, and many of the airlines have miles valued at >2% at that link. I also don't know where you're getting that 7 miles/dollar number from.
  - vmarsy 10y ago
    The 7 miles per dollar comes from the delta Amex marketing flyer sitting on my pile of mail, but I didn't look at the fine print, I got curious and looked into details : actually it's only 1 mile per dollar for usual purchases, you get one additional mile on "delta purchases", then you can get 5 extra more on money spent on flights itself. So yeah on average it's close to 1 mile per dollar, I can't edit the original post. So the math makes more sense with those numbers :)
    - desigooner 10y ago
      There's a reason they're called Sky Pesos :)
nommm-nommm 10y ago
It's an average bloggers come up with based on potential and actual redemptions. They even do really dumb stuff like counting the face value of a seat nobody would pay cash for. Like "I got this $6,000 seat for 100,000 miles, so they were worth 6 cents per point." What value you personally actually get out of miles is individualized and taking a valuation from a rando blogger at face value is incredibly stupid. Especially from bloggers like The Points Guy (which was linked), because they get kickback when you use their referral links to sign up for credit cards. If you offered me the choice between 10 AA miles and 1,000 Delta miles, I'd choose 10 AA miles, no matter what bloggers say. I'll always use AA miles and I would have trouble doing anything with Delta miles.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  vmarsy added that link after I wrote my comment, and it clearly doesn't justify his use of the term "best case".
- nataz 10y ago
  Airline miles are fascinating. For instance, I fly over 100,000 miles per year with one airline alliance which puts me in the highest earning category for earning award points. Essentially they give you a an 11x multiplayer of award miles for every actual mile (domestic, overseas is more complicated). At lower levels it may be be 9x or 7x, etc. That means the difficulty of earning miles scales significantly with frequency, which if course changes the value. Now, rather then trying to figure out the price of a ticket and comparing it to #of miles spent, which is difficult because of black out dates, variable pricing, destination/date premiums, and a ton of other factors, I found out you can just buy gift cards. Specifically, you can buy Amazon gift cards at about 15,000 points per $100 gift card. While not as fungible as USD, given my spending habits and Amazon's large selection, it becomes a pretty good stand in. That means for me, a mile is always worth around 0.006 cents at a minimum. At around 250,000 award miles a year that's around 1,600 dollars per year which isn't that bad. At the very least it's better then some random blogger picking a number based on ticket prices.

balls187 10y ago

Delta charges $0.035 a mile. http://www.delta.com/buygftxfer/displayBuyMiles.action http://www.delta.com/buygftxfer/displayBuyMiles.action

jessriedel 10y ago
What they sell miles for only gives you a soft upper bound on what miles are worth.

vmarsy 10y ago

I added a link to my original post, it varies by companies, delta is estimated at $0.012 apparently those days.

jessriedel 10y ago
I don't think "~1%" is a fair summary of that link, especially not "in the best case". You're trying to breakdown what happens to a 4% fee, and many of the airlines have miles valued at >2% at that link. I also don't know where you're getting that 7 miles/dollar number from.
- vmarsy 10y ago
  The 7 miles per dollar comes from the delta Amex marketing flyer sitting on my pile of mail, but I didn't look at the fine print, I got curious and looked into details : actually it's only 1 mile per dollar for usual purchases, you get one additional mile on "delta purchases", then you can get 5 extra more on money spent on flights itself. So yeah on average it's close to 1 mile per dollar, I can't edit the original post. So the math makes more sense with those numbers :)
  - desigooner 10y ago
    There's a reason they're called Sky Pesos :)

nommm-nommm 10y ago

It's an average bloggers come up with based on potential and actual redemptions. They even do really dumb stuff like counting the face value of a seat nobody would pay cash for. Like "I got this $6,000 seat for 100,000 miles, so they were worth 6 cents per point." What value you personally actually get out of miles is individualized and taking a valuation from a rando blogger at face value is incredibly stupid. Especially from bloggers like The Points Guy (which was linked), because they get kickback when you use their referral links to sign up for credit cards. If you offered me the choice between 10 AA miles and 1,000 Delta miles, I'd choose 10 AA miles, no matter what bloggers say. I'll always use AA miles and I would have trouble doing anything with Delta miles.

jessriedel 10y ago
vmarsy added that link after I wrote my comment, and it clearly doesn't justify his use of the term "best case".
nataz 10y ago
Airline miles are fascinating. For instance, I fly over 100,000 miles per year with one airline alliance which puts me in the highest earning category for earning award points. Essentially they give you a an 11x multiplayer of award miles for every actual mile (domestic, overseas is more complicated). At lower levels it may be be 9x or 7x, etc. That means the difficulty of earning miles scales significantly with frequency, which if course changes the value. Now, rather then trying to figure out the price of a ticket and comparing it to #of miles spent, which is difficult because of black out dates, variable pricing, destination/date premiums, and a ton of other factors, I found out you can just buy gift cards. Specifically, you can buy Amazon gift cards at about 15,000 points per $100 gift card. While not as fungible as USD, given my spending habits and Amazon's large selection, it becomes a pretty good stand in. That means for me, a mile is always worth around 0.006 cents at a minimum. At around 250,000 award miles a year that's around 1,600 dollars per year which isn't that bad. At the very least it's better then some random blogger picking a number based on ticket prices.