Best ways to get to Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific using miles from the US

It’s not that I’m not aware they exist — I traveled in economy to more than 30 countries before I discovered miles and points and spent many a night in hotels that cost $3-$10 per night. When I started collecting miles, I only ever intended to use them to fly in economy class — I had the perspective that it didn’t make sense to pay more to arrive at the same time. When I saw my earning ability as a finite thing, I had the same exact perspective as you — I’d rather travel to eight places in economy than four in business class.

However, once I discovered many of the methods that we write about here on Frequent Miler to earn a lot of miles without flying, I came to realize that the difference in miles required between economy class and business class is much smaller when using miles than when using money. Once I began flying in international business and first class, it cemented the fact that there is a ton of value in paying 50%-100% more than the economy mileage price to fly in a flat bed for 8 or 10 or 15 hours with great meals, wine, lounges, etc. Sometimes the difference is trivial — I recently flew in business class from Singapore to Hong Kong to Newark (about 20 hours of scheduled flight time) using 50K Alaska miles one way. The economy class price on that same route was 42.5K miles; business class in that scenario is 17.6% more expensive. In terms of generating the miles, 7.5K Alaska miles could be generated at Simon Malls at 1x for a cost of less than forty bucks. I would pay $40 more to spend 20 hours in business class any day of the week and I think many of our readers feel the same way. And that slowly came to define my perspective more over time — given the relatively inexpensive cost of generating miles, I could get exponentially more comfortable travel for less money than I used to spend on economy class.

To me, premium cabins often add a lot more value than what the mileage difference would buy me in terms of another economy class flight if I saved the miles for a future trip instead. I think a lot of our readers have come to the same conclusion. Obviously not everyone feels that way — but many do. In the case of the Alaska example above, spending 7.5K extra miles — or 10K more than what most programs charge in economy class — got me a much much more comfortable flight where I got a full night’s sleep and arrived rested and ready to go. That extra 7.5K or 10K miles won’t buy my a comparable amount of travel to how much better it was sleeping in a bed on the flight. Obviously, in some cases, the difference is much larger (like 40K vs 80K), but I still find that the difference yields more value than the 40K saved. Obviously we may have completely different perspectives here, but that’s mine.

Additionally, and I think this was pretty well supported by our recent 40K challenge, it is hard to get meaningful value out of points for economy class travel. Economy class flights to Australia cost 40,000 miles each way with most programs. With fare sales often dipping into the $600-$800 range round trip from the US, you’re getting pretty poor value for miles when redeeming for economy class travel. If your central goal is to fly in economy class, in my opinion you are better off focusing mainly on cash back and hunting for fare sales. Apart from a couple of great economy class sweet spots (like the Turkish 7.5K sweet spot to Hawaii), most flights just aren’t a terribly good value for miles in economy. The opportunity cost of collecting miles becomes substantially higher if you’re using them towards lower value redemptions. For example, if you only get 1 cent per mile in value, any spend you’re doing at less than 2 miles per dollar would be better off put on a 2% cash back card. If you have cards that earn 2.5-3% cash back, the balance tilts even farther towards earning cash back. The exception here is if you are interested in very expensive destinations, but more often than not you will do better with a cash-centric strategy.

One quick example: we’ve written extensively about how you can fly to Hawaii in economy class for 7.5K Turkish miles from anywhere in the mainland (with UA saver availability of course). I’ve then written several times about how Jetstar sells tickets as low as $118 one way from Honolulu to Sydney (and not much more to Melbourne or Christchurch). Using 35K miles or 40K miles to accomplish what could be accomplished with 7.5K miles and $118 is just a really poor value use of miles in my opinion. It’s worth having some points for stuff like that 7.5K sweet spot, but a more cash back heavy strategy would make more sense for economy class travel.

On the other hand, business and first class flights tend to be multiple times as expensive as economy class travel — it’s not uncommon for business or first class flights to cost 4-10x or more the cash price of economy class flights. Paying double the miles cost of economy for business or first class provides significantly more value for your miles (and indeed, in the case of the example using Alaska miles above, paying just 7.5K miles more yields a seat/experience that would ordinarily cost many times the economy class price). That of course relies on you valuing the business/first class experience. In my case, it’s not that I am “too good” to fly in economy class or that I can’t do it if I wanted to — but if I can generate the miles easily to fly more comfortably, I’d rather do that. And, again, the reason a post like this focuses on premium cabins is because that’s where the value is. The economy class version of this post would be much shorter because there just aren’t many great options.

That’s not to say I’d never look at economy class for deals — indeed, if you followed our 40K challenge, you saw just how extreme we all went in looking for economy class deals. There are some to be found here and there, but they are few and far between comparatively.