Having moved my never ending quest for free plane tickets to Europe, I am finding the project infinitely more difficult due to the dearth of methods by which one may attain "miles", the frequent flyer currency, as well as the insidiously miserly attitude British Airways has toward coach class passengers. That's another long story. The interesting thing I accomplished this evening was a calculation of the approximate worth of one BA mile: 0.61 Pence, that's just about 1 US cent.

How? By mock-booking numerous flights in various price ranges and comparing them to available mileage flights, I divided the prices I was offered by the number of miles that I could have used. Taking tax into consideration, the average popped out at just about 0.61p per mile.

This number is useful when calculating how much one would benefit from getting a mileage earning credit card, which pays you 1 mile per pound spent. For every £100 spent you therefore get about a 0.61 61 pence return, which is pretty pathetic really, but still justifies the Amex card I got because it has no annual fee. So I win, but barely.

The bottom line is that it is never worth paying extra for BA miles, unless you're receiving them at a price significantly lower than 0.61p. If the credit card has an annual fee, that's probably enough to destroy any benefit from it.

This is the kind of crap I think about. [more info]