My highest domestic economy redemption yet!!

Here's another real-world example for you: a good friend in Detroit wanted to come visit us in NYC for a long weekend. Fares between Detroit and NYC are notoriously high for last-minute travel so the only way it was going to work is if I could find a reward seat. As I mentioned before, flying on points is usually best when you either book very far in advance or very last minute, and since he was proposing flying here tonight or tomorrow, I was somewhat hopeful. 

As I've discussed in my tips, I priced out the flight and the cheapest non-stop I could find was a whopping $844 – even when I tried different days and times. Going with a 1-stop option got the price down to $550, but that's still really expensive and it tripled the length of travel time for him. 

I logged in to Delta.com and found out that a non-stop itinerary was going to be 65,000 miles (32.5k each way...

United was a little better, but he would have missed all of Friday coming on the Saver seat, so it would have cost 30,000 miles to get him here Friday morning and home Monday evening. 

I logged in to British Airways and lo and behold, I found Saver award space on their partner American for 9,000 points round-trip at exactly the times we wanted!

So if we go back and do the math, I managed to get 9.4¢ per mile ($844 ÷ 9000) on a domestic economy redemption!