The day before my birthday I bought my one way plane ticket to Beijing (happy birthday to me!). Using the incredible ITA Matrix Airfare Search I was able to find out about an amazing deal on my long international flight.

My lovely Aunt is paying for my flight from Boston to Seattle and I’ll be visiting with them for a week before continuing on so I only had to worry about flying from Washington state to China. The search matrix (which searches pretty much every airline carrier in existence) led me to a direct flight from Seattle to Beijing for $426 with Hainan Airlines. Yes that’s right - $425.50 for a 12 hour flight across the Pacific Ocean with no stops in between.

But I was torn. I had spent the last 9 months or so wracking up airline miles so that I wouldn’t have to spend a dime on my flight to China. That’s what all that effort in reaching travel hacking and applying for credit cards was for but Hainan Airlines is affiliated with American Airlines and of course I didn’t have any miles with them. Of course.

I had plenty of airline miles with United however and they had a flight that went Seattle to San Francisco and then San Fran to Beijing for $577 or 35,000 miles. Doing the math I had learned from my favorite travel hacking website ThePointsGuy this wasn’t all that great of a deal.

If you divide the price of the ticket by the number of miles it will cost you find the cost per mile. In this case my cost/mile would be 1.6 cents/mile which is right on the border of the ‘use your miles vs. pay for the ticket’ threshold (which seems to be if it’s above 1.4 cents/mile you are ok to use miles). Make sense?

Just go with it.

I sent my dilemma out into the travel hacking world and asked people’s opinions on the matter and got a resounding “I’d pay for the ticket and save your miles for a much more expensive flight”. So that’s exactly what I ended up doing.

Because let’s be honest - $426 for a direct international flight is pretty darn cheap and I will most likely have (hopefully) many more flights to come that are equipped with a heftier price tag.

And on that note…I’M HEADED TO CHINA!

Have you ever encountered this dilemma? Did you end up paying for the flight or using your hard earned airline miles?