“No Reward Is Worth This”
I love the line that Harrison Ford/Han Solo says in the middle of the original Star Wars after listening to Princess Leia whine and moan about how she is being rescued. He had been originally motivated to rescue her because he had been lead to expect a huge reward, but he just found her insufferable.
Some Rewards Just Aren’t Worth It
The idea of free travel is very alluring, but it often doesn’t work out quite as you would expect. First of all, most awards are highly restricted. I have had to cut vacations short in order to fit the airline’s award availability. In that case, the reward ticket really wasn’t worth the amount it would have cost me to pay for it. If I was paying for it, I would have been able to stay a couple extra days, rather than return early.
Other times, the reward comes with so many extra fees, that the only real way to think of it is as a discounted ticket. This post over at Flyertalk got me thinking:
…I think we have to change our collective mindset. We have to stop thinking in terms of “free” (i.e., no cash, I know how much we put up with to earn those miles, been there done that) awards and start thinking in terms of discounted awards. That’s where the world is today, like it or not, with different airlines more or less up front about it. When we make “burn or buy” decisions we can no longer just look at the fare and evaluate it in terms of the number of miles we’d need for an award. We have to look at the difference between the cash fare and the discounted cash-plus-miles award fare. Most of us realize this at some level, but I’m not sure it’s penetrated to the subconscious.
This makes a lot of sense. You could think of your reward ticket as a coupon for a discount off of a fare. That is what I had to do when I booked my last award trip on Delta. I had to book three seats to one of their international destination. I booked one award ticket in business class, using 230,000 miles, and the taxes were merely $47. The other two tickets were purchased with the “pay with miles” option. I merely subtracted the miles from my account and my wife’s, at 1 cent per mile, from the cost of the the remaining two tickets we needed. We still had to pay some for the tickets, but Delta miles are so devalued, this was a better use of the miles than redeeming 180,000 miles each for tickets that only cost $1,200.
Sometimes the Reward Just Isn’t Worth It
I frequently harp on United Airlines, however, but I have nothing on this guy. By now, you have probably seen Dave Carroll’s video on how United destroyed his guitar, and than gave him a complete run around when he tried to file a claim, which ultimately denied.
The last time I flew United, it was on a reward ticket, and virtually everything they did was tremendously screwed up. Like Dave Carroll, nobody would help me, even their supervisors told me to get lost. Unlike Dave, I wasn’t able to write a song, instead, I just threatened to write every newspaper, magazine, TV show and website. Only then, did they attempt to address their mistreatment of me and my family. The complete story is here. Worse, I experienced terrible treatment on the reward flights that were on United aircraft. That story is here. What gets me most is that on multiple occasions we were informed that we were being treated differently because we were traveling with award tickets. This is a violation of their contract of carriage, as it makes no distinction between paid tickets and award tickets, but they do it anyways.
After that trip, we had learned are lesson. The rewards just weren’t worth it. We made the decision to stop flying United Airlines, and to stop accruing MileagePlus miles. I like the idea of traveling for free, but no reward is worth the kind of aggravation that United Airlines seems to be designed to generate. Flyertalk’s MileagePlus forum is filled with stories of people who have stopped flying United for similar reasons, people who now spend a lot of money on other airlines, and are openly looking forward to the permanent demise of that company.
Fortunately, You Do Have Alternatives
All the United hubs, with the possible exception of their Washington Dulles hub, have strong competition from other airlines. Even in Washington, you have two other airports to choose from. If you must fly United, you can choose to earn mileage in another Star Alliance airline’s program such as US Airways or Continental’s. The Chase bank MileagePlus cards are an equally bad choice, as you are tying yourself to United Airlines loyalty programs. Even if you try to use your miles for travel on other airlines, you still face Starnet Blocking.
Finally, don’t ever check anything valuable or fragile on United, or any other airline.
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