Every time I’ve used a platform OTA, the prices were way higher and less choices (even with the point discount) than I could purchase on another OTA.
I never considered platform OTAs a reasonable option.
I never considered platform OTAs a reasonable option.
I’d say that was good value.
Would you have paid anything close to the cash price though?
If not, the $0.20/point value seems to be more of an arbitrary number often abused by bloggers.
It's what I have the cards for, after all.
It’s all about perspective.
For instance, my wife and I end up doing the MCO <-> ATL route a few times a year. We live in Orlando and our family/friends are in ATL.
(Don’t quote me on the exact numbers. I found something similar when I looked a couple of months ago)
I could fly main cabin for 13,000 miles one way and get around 1.3 cpp on Delta Main cabin. Alternatively, I was able to find a Delta flight booked through Virgin Atlantic for 18000 miles first class where I would get 1.7 cpp.
The value chasers would have chosen Virgin Atlantic. I fly Main anyway and it wasn’t worth the extra 5000 points.
While 5000 points is only worth about $75, even with my best earning Amex Point categories - groceries and dining at 4x on the Gold - I would still need to spend $1250 to recoup those points.
Also, the standard issue with booking through partners is that only a limited number of award bookings are open and usually first class. I could find multiple flights on any given day on Delta. I could find only one during the week on Virgin Atlantic.
There is a huge difference between being able to book a flight on a random day from a random place to a random destination and just choose to pay with miles like I can do on any random Delta domestic flight for 1.3 - 1.5 cpp and having to deal with partners and waiting for award flights to open up and then only on certain days and from certain cities.
It was my first time using it and it was about as painless as I could have hoped for.
I will say that we mostly only fly to a couple places and we mostly fly ANA, so we are an edge case.
In that case, I take back everything I stand corrected.
The ANA flights in these cases were Star Alliance operated long haul legs paired with shorter ANA operated legs, and we got to see both the older and newer business class for Delta (typical for most routes; we aren't where ANA runs their specific long haul). Newer is MUCH nicer.
Amex in particular for domestic flights have Delta and JetBlue as a partner. You get much better value by transferring to one of those two than booking through a portal.
You will only get 1 cent per point by using the portal. You can routinely get 1.2 - 1.5 cents per point for Skymiles
If anything, I find it is the opposite. The US Big 3 have very little inventory open - and what is open is super expensive. (Let’s say $10k worth of airline miles for sake of argument.)
You’re better off using CC points for tickets through the card’s OTA where you can get the above $10k itinerary for $2k worth of points - and since the value per point is known and fixed, this price is never a surprise.