I've been very confused about the really negative sniping responses to this program saying the miles aren't worth much.
A million frequent flier miles via a major alliance airline is a very, very sweet prize. That's enough for a person to fly themselves and their spouse to basically anywhere on the planet in business class five times, round trip.
Business class international on Delta is far more than that. I know, I fly Delta first-class often enough and that's ~100k/roundtrip domestic. So that would be five first-class domestic flights for me and a partner at 1MM miles. Business class international? Might get one roundtrip flight between the two of us with some leftover miles for domestics.
They all suck. It's a race to the bottom. Delta is at least upfront about it and their FF program IMO is overall the best (behind American) depending on your geographic location and actual desire to fly (and not run miles like your life depended on it).
A UA saver award on business is 115k miles roundtrip international. You could fly from San Francisco to anywhere in Europe in business class and back for 115k miles + ~$10.
Depending upon saver vs. standard and the destination, it's probably not quite that good--but, still, two to three pairs of round-trip business class tickets, which isn't bad.
A good rule of thumb for the floor value of miles is a $0.01 per mile (i.e. a penny). From a value perspective, you usually get a better exchange for business and first. Of course, you may or may not normally pay for those upgraded seats if it were your own cash so imputing the actual value is difficult in that case.
You may have misunderstood me. I was talking about the value of frequent flyer reward miles. So, for example, in rough terms, a round trip coast-to-coast coach flight in the US is going to cost you on the order of 50,000 rewards miles depending upon a number of factors. Buying the same ticket for cash will probably run you about $500--again in rough terms. So your "miles" (really reward points but everyone calls them miles) are worth about a penny a mile in that scenario.
Some airlines are moving to systems that tie reward miles more explicitly to both cost of tickets paid for and value of tickets being redeemed for but the above scenario is how it's generally been done to date.
I also don't understand the comments that you wouldn't like 1 Million miles from United and they are saying the miles don't matter. Everyone is saying "united is shit" because they don't like the service and not because of what is being discussed in the article.
A million frequent flier miles via a major alliance airline is a very, very sweet prize. That's enough for a person to fly themselves and their spouse to basically anywhere on the planet in business class five times, round trip.