In order to calculate the value of certain frequent flyer programs, it is necessary to understand what it would cost to buy those airline tickets with cold hard cash. In economic terms, I think this is referred to as the replacement cost. Given that airline pricing strategy is one of the more complex human endeavors (witness the armies of economics PhDs hired by airlines to tackle this stuff!), we aren’t aiming for anything near perfection here, just a directional estimate. Here are some of the high level aspects of our study:

• GetDebit uses kayak.com to find lowest published fares.  We focus on economy fares only.
• For each route, we identify a low, mid and high season time-frame to visit that destination, and we gather market prices for each of these periods. The table below only shows our low season data so that the table doesn’t run on forever.
• We focused on major routes within the US, as well as US-Europe and US-Asia. While we could have expanded to cover Latin American, Australia, and other geographies, we felt that we had enough data points to derive useful estimates.
• For cities with multiple airports, such as London and New York, we searched across all available airports.
• We always price tickets at least 1 month in advance to try to avoid unusual pricing due to timing-related issues.
• To calculate the pre-tax ticket costs (necessary for our analyses since frequent flyer programs require participants to pay taxes and fees out-of-pocket), GetDebit backs out from the market estimate the typical taxes associated with a given award ticket on a given route for the specific airline in question.
• Of course, ticket prices will vary based on many conditions, including fuel costs, general economic activity, supply-demand, and so on. We’ll be periodically updating and adding to our pricing database over time to try to keep it as accurate as we can, within reason.