But it gets better!Īt the time, I used my Chase Sapphire Reserve Card to earn 3x points per dollar on the flight, for a total of 7,500 Ultimate Rewards points, worth $165, but if booking today, I'd use The Platinum Card from American Express, to earn 5x Membership Rewards points for a grand total of 12,500 (worth $237.50), instead. Since you can't purchase United miles at such a low rate, spending the $2,500 seemed like a reasonable choice here.
Considering that I would have needed to redeem 127,500 United miles for the round-trip (57,500 for the United segment and 70,000 for Air Canada), and we value United miles at 1.5 cents each, we would have needed to redeem $1,912.50 'worth' of miles for the flight. Normally we'd prefer to redeem miles, but given that these flights were scheduled around a huge international event in Paris, there wasn't award availability for the flights I needed. I flew a United 767 on the outbound and was set to fly an Air Canada 777-300ER on the return, both in paid business class.
When I booked my Paris Air Show flight back in October of 2016, United was offering round-trip business-class fares for $2,500. I ended up flying from Paris to Muscat (MCT) to Colombo (CMB) on Oman Air, then on to Doha (DOH) on SriLankan, to London (LHR) on Qatar Airways, and finally to Toronto (YYZ) and home to New York (LGA) on Air Canada.
