Conventional wisdom says that using your miles for simple domestic economy travel is typically NOT the best usage of your miles. Sure, there are some exceptions like using 4500 British Airways Avios for short-haul flights (soon going up to a minimum of 7500 Avios!), but I’ve heard the conventional wisdom is that it’s “only” international first class flights where you can get truly outsized value for your miles.
If you want to fly domestic economy flights, the conventional wisdom says, you’re best off putting your spend on a 2% cashback card and using the cashback to pay cash for your tickets. You’re unlikely to get more than 2 cents per mile, and paying cash for your tickets also allows you to EARN miles on your ticket
This is an overly simplistic rendering of the viewpoint, and ignore credit card signup bonuses, but that is what I hear most of the time.
Flying our family of 8 from Seattle
For an upcoming trip, we need a one-way ticket back from Seattle. American and United both have no availability, and Southwest does not fly to Cincinnati. Delta’s availability was actually pretty good – there were SEVERAL flights with 8 Saver level seats available (for 12,500 miles each)
As we know, one way to look at it is to compare it to the cash price. Here’s the cash prices for Delta flights on that same day.
It’s hard to know exactly what price to use – the flight we ended up booking with our 100,000 Skymiles is one of those $458 ones, so our 100,000 miles saved us $3,664 for our 8 seats, or about 3.64 cents per mile (not bad, Skypesos!)
The actual value is probably a little less than that, since we probably would have booked the $336 one, or maybe a $255 flight on American, but even that cheaper American flight comes out at 2.04 cpm, and the timings are actually pretty bad (2 stops and a 4 hour layover in Milwaukee).
So what do you think? Is redeeming miles on domestic economy a bad thing, or would you have done something else? What’s your “worst” miles redemption ever been?
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
With credit card bonuses and MS techniques, miles are often free, or severely discounted. Sure, you always want to get the most value from those miles, but at the end of the day you saved a TON of money. “Value” is in the eye of the beholder. Saving $3,600 in airline costs using no matter how many points constitutes pretty good “value” to me!
I agree – instead of thinking about the cost per mile, think about it in the cost to generate a mile – how much does it take to GENERATE (usually through Manufactured Spending) that mile
As a person that uses his miles exclusively for domestic travel I agree with this logic but holy crap 100k miles one way? This is why families are so small these days, its hard to afford travel on the average middle class churners signup bonuses.
I know… I know… Such are the dilemmas of a family of 8 🙂
Was thinking of you, Dan, just yesterday. Wife and I landed a cavernous room — um…. the suite of all suites — in Orlando, at a really nice Ascend collection blue something or other resort in Florida. (8,000 Choice points plus $15 — sic) For that, we had THREE bed rooms, plus sofa-couch in living room, plus top-notch kitchen, DR, and two bathrooms w/ jacuzzi. Place could easily have accommodated your gang… I’m going to enjoy transferring Amtrak points to Choice later this year.
ps, Long ago, I was the oldest of six — and as such, much admire your efforts to travel with the whole crew. 🙂
no way! you “bought” yourself a direct flight that you may not have sprung for with cash – and i’m sure your family will appreciate not having to make the connection(s). 3.64 cpm is solid.
One of my goals is NOT to pay for plane tickets period. That’s not always possible but sure, I’ll use miles for domestic economy. Am doing that for two upcoming ski trips. Flying into small ski-town airports can be quite pricey and I’ve even coughed up enough miles for first class when that was all that was available. So I have no issues using miles for domestic economy!
I agree. My goal is to never pay for air tickets or hotels. My time accumulating miles and points pays off big time.
No way. That’s a killer redemption, even if it’s not the most aspirational. Full support!
I redeemed about the same amount of miles for a fancy Zojirushi rice cooker and a Nespresso Grand Maestria coffee maker – about $1K total value. I had the miles sitting around for years and could never find the DL award availability on the flights that I wanted. After deciding I would never use the miles for flights, I used them for a hotel redemption. That hotel turned out to be a dump, so we left and successfully negotiated a refund of miles. The refund was used to purchase the aforementioned household appliances. I admit, this was a poor redemption value, but after 2 years, we continue to use the appliances every day – so perhaps in retrospect, it wasn’t such a bad decision. The really great decision was to direct our point earnings to programs other than DL!
One thing I will say for Delta – their availability has been a TON better lately, especially compared to American or United
Concur …. something “friendly” of late seems to have “infected” the Delta availability systems. (Like too the growing #’s of discounted routes cropping up…. ) And oh my, for us, the Delta coach flights lately seem so much more pleasant than the southwest “cattle car” system. Not as good as “JetBlue” — but bad nist — not bad at’all.
(and I write as one who went nearly a decade without a nice thing to say about Delta)
That is a fantastic redemption! Nice work.
Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s not a fantastic redemption. I’d be thrilled with that even for my AA and UA miles.
The whole point of this “game” is to save money. I think with so many blogs writing about traveling in first class to exotic places, has people forgetting that. They may take that one amazing first class one-way trip but end up paying for 10 round trip domestic flights in the states, and in the end barely saving any money.
You saved over $3,500, there is nothing wrong with that at all. Especially at a 3.64 CPM rate.
Yeah I agree (which is why I did it in the first place!!) :-). And you’re totally right – one of the reasons I started this blog was to show that there are plenty of people out there traveling “normally” and it’s okay to do that!
Fantastic redemption. So excited for you to be able to get the whole family on the same plane all at SAVER level!!
That probably deserves a followup post in and of itself because there were THREE flights on that same route / day with 8+ seats. Contrast that with American and United that didn’t even have availability for ONE seat!
100,000 miles to fly 8 people anywhere is a deal. I sometimes pay 100K miles just to fly myself somewhere LOL.
Good for you, if you saved some money and wouldn’t have otherwise taken the trip, it’s totally worth it. When I had miles constantly falling on my head due to extensive international business travel, I never paid for a flight, whether it was domestic or international. After the biz travel mostly stopped, I get nearly all of my miles through signup bonuses and card spend. Miles are now more of a scarce commodity to me so I tend to hold the view that I’ll just pay for domestic tickets if they are somewhat reasonable (say…under $400? for west coast travel) and save my miles for overseas destinations, including Hawaii, where I can get more value per mile. Of course, I’m only paying for 4 people vs. 8, so I can totally understand your logic.
Fantastic redemption! I have also been finding far better redemption options on Delta domestic than United or, especially, American since the merger. A follow up post comparing availability among the major domestic carriers would, I think, prove very interesting.
why wouldn’t you just fly southwest to dayton. depending on where you live in cincinnati, you are as close from dayton as from cincinnati, which is actually in kentucky.
Yeah – it’s an option and when I’ve flown Southwest before, we’ve flown out of Dayton, Columbus or Indy. The problem here is that we are leaving FROM Cincinnati, so if we flew back to Dayton, we’d have to figure out how to either leave our van up there or take (two) taxis down to Cincy
SW does fly to Dayton which is only 40 mins or so from Cincy…didn’t want to consider that?
i have been to 26 countries, and I have never flown business or first class. I would like to, but I get pretty cheap about things. Plus I have 5 people in my family, and my daughter always wants to take someone along on the trip, so…..
ANA and Aeroplan has economy flights from PHX to CDG in June for 55k points, plus 75$. To buy that ticket is 1384 right now…its a little more than 2c redemption
plus we do a lot of last minute travel, and using Avios to go from PHX to SEA or PDX OR OAK last minute for 15k RT is pretty awesome.
You did exactly what I think we should always do: compare the cash price with the points and choose the better value. That’s all we should worry about. Sure, you can get a better cpm going to Europe or Asia, but you aren’t trying to get to E or A, but to Cinn.
I recently was booking to quick weekend trips to visit family during DL’s domestic award trip sale. One worked out cheaper on miles and one on cash, and that’s how I booked them.