Eric, who writes on Travel Codex, recently published his award calculator on which mileage program would be best to redeem to various fixed locations. He reached out to me and sent me the spreadsheet for me to review and all in all, I think it’s a pretty good value for $10 if you use the coupon he posted on Travel Codex, which is “travelcodex” he also gave me “CHASINGTHEPOINTS” but it only knocks off $7, and it would be a disservice if I told you to use the code for me versus the better one.
For this example, if we wanted to go to the Maldives from the US, accumulating Alaska Airline miles would be the best bet for business class as it would require only 100,000 miles round trip. In order to grab those Alaska miles, you would want to convert from Starwood Preferred Guest. My assumption for this redemption, would be on Cathay Pacific.
You can also play around with many of the values in one of the tabs where you can place how much it cost you to acquire the transferrable point.
The Value:
Where I find value in this tool is having an idea of where you want to go and having all the award charts in one handy spreadsheet to give you an idea of how many miles it will cost you to get you to a location. I wouldn’t use this as a be all end all tool or a tool to figure out the locations of where you should go on vacation. This tool will really shine once it moves online where there can be dynamic values instead of fixed locations.
There’s also nuances to the various programs that I am not familiar with since I am still a novice at redeeming points. That being said, it was very helpful to see everything on one screen. I didn’t expand the screenshot since Eric took the time to put enter it all in the spreadsheet so here’s a short piece of it:
