Miles- Guess it is because I’m old & stupid

With those choices, I would pay cash for premium economy and add the miles to your stash.

You may be old but probably not all that stupid.

The problem has something to do with COVID when people could not travel at all and then could only travel minimally.

People bought and earned reward / miles but could not use them so they added up. And now most, if not all travelers, have lots of mile they want to use and the airline are saying, "not so fast". So the airlines jacked up how many miles are required to travel along with required cash.

Last time, I looked not all trips required mile plus cash but the miles required were like 100,000.

I think that greed might also be a factor.

Maybe eventually, miles out there will get reduced and airlines will come down to earth.

Those must be flights on British AirwYs planes. They always have surcharges like that.

You need to find flights on American Airlines planes instead, but it Is not easy. Their Saver awards are limited and disappear quickly after they are released. The Anytime reward seats need a lot more miles.

BA only charges the ridiculous fees on long haul flights.

I've been using my BA miles for intra-European flights.

As an example, I flew biz class from LHR to VIE (Vienna) for 20,000 miles and a fee of 1 GBP. A year before it was 15,000 miles.

I used to fly BA across the pond but I've switched to AA.

You just have to check often. We are leaving for Barcelona tonight and I had originally used Alaska miles on Finnair without the best routing for 30k miles + $30 each. I was able to cancel and change it to a better route on American for 27.5k miles + $19 a month ago. I upgraded my husband to PE for about 15k miles more as a father's day gift.

I am not sure if you follow Flyer Talk, but part of the reason the good awards get snapped up is because a lot of people book them speculatively when they see them as soon as they are published. Since the only thing you lose is the partner award fee of $12.50 (and usually you can get that back if there was any meaningful flight change). So sometimes you see better redemptions closer to your trip. This is a gamble, of course.

I have funded the past four trips to Europe on points. American Airlines seems to have the best deals, especially if you book when the flight window opens. For a May-June 2025 trip to London, I just paid 38,000 round trip and $200.00 fees on a Saint Louis via Chicago to London ticket. (I booked this week). If things don't work out, I will cancel and bank my points. This route for next summer will be anywhere from 70,000 to 120,000 points if booked later in the year and the cost for a main cabin ticket will run around $1700.00.

I also "collect" Delta points through my Amex card, but for the past few years Delta has been requiring many more points to get to London. If you are going in January, you should be able to pick up a bargain considering it is not a peak travel time. I would keep looking around. When you search, only look at AA airline (BA is always high on taxes and fees) and then pull down the calendar if your dates are flexible. Also, you can filter by one stop, two stops, etc, and make sure you scroll through all the possible flight options. (Sometimes the cheaper flights are further down the page).

The key, as stated just above, is to book early, ideally 330:days ahead, when the award seats are released. Just now I saw Finnair from ORD to WAW for 35K miles plus $26 on June 14. That is on the AS website, but I assume those same seats are available with AA miles.

It's not really new. Years ago we were going to use AA points for a flight from the west coast to LHR. (British Airways was operating the flight.) The cost was tons of points and about $1,000 in tax and fees. Ridiculous.

Old? Well, that’s relative.

Stupid? Certainly not!

Being well-located, with lots of airline options … that’s something to consider further.

Starting from O’Hayre gives you choices, with or without having/using Miles. How much competition do British Airways and American Airlines have in Chicago? Denver International Airport has more options now than back in the day, with British Airways, United, Lufthansa, Icelandair, and just recently, Turkish Air all flying direct to Europe. I’ve only got Miles with one of those, BA. Any route other than a direct flight from Denver means extra money (and time and energy) to connect at at least one additional airport. Some flights are better deals than others.

Flying from the “Basel” Airport (which is in France !) to London in a couple of weeks is going to cost 9,000 Avios plus $1.00 for one person. That’s pretty good. Then, the flight back to Denver from London will take a lot more Avios and really a lot more dollars. But we jumped through enough credit card hoops to have earned a “Companion Ticket,” whereby two can fly for the price of one person’s Avios, plus additional fees for each person. Not two-for-one, and not everybody has someone to accompany them, but it’s better than full price! You can’t really equate dollars to Avios; it’s not a 1:1 ratio. But spending Avios means spending fewer dollars, although it’s not always a reasonable value.

As an example, in steerage, Denver to Warsaw round-trip for one person on BA next January will cost $664 out of pocket. Applying Avios will reduce the fare by just $24 for just 2,000 Avios, or up to $410 for 81,050 Avios. You get more discount per Avio (if that’s the singular) using 2,000 than when you use 81,000+. It’s diminishing returns, the more Avios you spend. But Avios don’t precisely equal dollars, and hey, if you can save $410 some way, it’s not the worst thing in the world. So it’s $664 out of pocket, or $640+2K Avios, or $254+over 81K Avios. Additionally, it would be $416+over 47K Avios. Perhaps that’s a clearer choice than what you described for ORD. Although if you’d jumped through credit card hoops to earn cash back instead of miles, perhaps that might’ve been a better reward. From Denver, the flight to Warsaw connects in London, then straight to Warsaw (after an overnight, which means sleeping in a plastic chair in the terminal, or at a hotel). Coming home means flying BA, Finnair, and/or AA, with two connections.

If Denver seems like possibly a better deal than Chicago, how much will it cost you to get to Denver? There goes your savings. Or, what if you paid some other airline to get you to Europe, then used miles to get onward to Warsaw?

Spend Avios or don’t, depending on whether it makes economic sense. A person who’s got experience and is wise will see when it doesn’t, and you’re already there.

It’s true that the old days where there was a fixed table of mileage amounts, and you called the airline to see if it was available for your chosen date and destination, with low (but not nonexistent) fees are long gone. Now it’s all online dynamic pricing where mileage amounts can vary wildly among different flights even on the same day, let alone on different days. But it’s still possible to get decent deals, especially if you’re flexible. My experience is normally with Delta. Within the last two years or so, I’ve gotten good mileage deals (including fees) to Budapest and (not surprisingly) Des Moines, and acceptable deals to New Orleans, Seattle, Portland, and London. The domestic flights are often better because the fees are so much lower.

As mentioned, it’s. BA’s fault, and the ridiculous fees at LHR.

Last December, my husband and I flew from a tiny airport in central Oregon to Frankfurt, via Seattle, on Alaska Air and Condor. Round trip per person: 50k miles + $110.

Now it’s all online dynamic pricing where mileage amounts can vary
wildly among different flights even on the same day, let alone on
different days.

This cuts both ways. I've recently see some advertising for reduced mileage deals. Of course, these deals are for where I'm not to where I don't want to be.

Rewards flight are all a big game and take a lot of perseverence. It's much worse if you require (like us) business class tickets. You have to start early (when tickets are released) and don't be hung up on round-trip tickets. If you find a good deal one-way, then grab it. You have to check the major sites and apps almost daily. For this year I booked a flight home first, in November 2023, flying from Geneva back to San Francisco on an American Airline flight on a BA plane. The usual surcharges on BA were half of what they normally charge on that flight, so I jumped on it. For some reason they offered a flight back to the U.S. at a reasonable rate, but never offered a similar deal for the flight to Europe needed a few weeks earlier. So I searched for a flight to Europe for several more months before one popped up on Air France. It was the flight of my dreams: nonstop San Francisco to Paris for the minimum mileage they charge for that flight and no stupid British surcharges. Because I wouldn't settle for all the super high-mileage flights, I had to keep searching almost daily. Some of the mileage requirements were utterly ridiculous so the search took a long time to fly for minimum miles. It was critical to use two or three of the rewards flight apps that will alert you when a ticket for a desired route becomes available. They have free versions of the apps but you really need to pay for their monthly subscription for the "pro version." It's worth the small cost to save big money (miles/points) on your flight and once booked you can cancel the subscription. Seats.aero worked good for me. Seat Spy is another one. There are several you can choose from. Good luck.