Don’t waste your hard-earned rewards points learning how to use them.  Follow me as I crawl through a ticketing experience.

The background:  I wanted two round-trip Business Class tickets from Cincinnati to Barcelona in September.  Beginning in January, I hounded Delta.com looking for rewards tickets at the low end of their redemption scale (which runs from 100,000 to 325,000 Skymiles for a Business Class ticket.)  Their award calendar had mostly blue days — blue for days with high-end, 325,000 mile tickets — 650,000 for two roundtrips wasn’t going to happen.  Chasing green (low mileage) days led to flights with obscene layovers, bad connections, or revealed the disconnect between Delta’s Rewards Calendar and actual available bookings — I’d book one way and by the time I’d gotten to the return booking, it didn’t exist.  I may have screamed — several times.

The purchase:  In early July, the price for two round-trip business class fares, which had been floating around $9600, finally broke below my $5000 target, to $4869.20.  Faced with Skymiles point redemptions still stuck at the high end of Delta’s 100,000 to 325,000 range, I gave up on Skymiles and charged two tickets, redeeming 56,301 Chase Ultimate Rewards points  to reduce my out of pocket to $4193.59 [for no reason other than 56,301 points were in my account that day.]

$ 4869.20   2 Business Class tickets
– 563.01    Redeem 56,301 Ultimate Rewards points at 1 cent each for credit
– 112.60    20% redemption bonus credit for travel purchases
________
$ 4193.59    Use Chase Sapphire Rewards Visa to purchase

Did I do OK?   Under $2100 each for roundtrip business class to Europe — I was feeling pretty good about the ticket price until — no surprise — buyer’s remorse reared its ugly head.

What about the 56,301 points I had blown — redeemed for only 1.2 cents per point?  If Ultimate Rewards had let me transfer points to Delta, 56,000 wouldn’t have made a big splash in the ocean of Skymiles needed for two tickets — even had the minimum 200,000 point redemption been available.  (Keep an eye on Delta partner Air France, which sometimes holds redemption sales, opening up business tickets at 50,000 each way.)

The $4193 I spent would have bought about 120,000 Skymiles from Delta at 3.5 cents each — if Delta didn’t limit me to buying 60,000 each year.  120,000 plus the 56,000 I redeemed was still way short.

I’m real close to rationalizing my decision.  One more step:

Since I paid for the tickets, I was earning a lot of points back:

+ 12,582 to Ultimate Rewards from my Chase Sapphire (4193.59 x3 for travel)
+   880 year-end 7% Chase checking account customer bonus on earned points
+ 13,859 ticket #1 Delta Skymiles @1.5 per mile flown in Business Class
+ 13,859 ticket #2 Delta Skymiles @1.5 per mile flown in Business Class
+  1,875 Air France points (BCN to CDG leg @2.5 per mile European Business Class)
+  1,875 Air France points (BCN to CDG leg @2.5 per mile European Business Class)
_________
44,930 total miles earned back of the 56,301 redeemed

So I got back all but 11,371 of the points I redeemed to get the $675.61 credit, making the redemption worth almost 6 cents a point.

I had a great time in Europe.  Did I do the math right?