We recently finalized the itinerary for a short vacation in Mexico City! This will be the first time for my husband and myself visiting Mexico, let alone Mexico City. We were on the fence for a while because flights from NYC tend to be rather expensive, but when we finally saw some very attractive award tickets, we couldn’t pass it up. Let’s get into what we booked…

1. How we landed on Mexico City
2. What we booked: two one-way flights in economy
3. This is a good deal for an economy flight!
4. Summary

How we landed on Mexico City

The idea to travel somewhere around Christmas came up because in 2025 Christmas and New Year’s are on Thursdays. That means that by taking one or two days vacation, you can get 1.5 week vacation. Unfortunately my husband doesn’t get a ‘winter break’ at his company, but at least we’d be able to travel over the Christmas long weekend.

We considered the Canary Islands, but this was very expensive. We looked at Madrid and Barcelona, and while the cheapest tickets were $600 it, I actually wanted to fly with a SkyTeam airline, given my Flying Blue Gold status. Unfortunately, flying KLM, Air France or Delta would rocket the price to over $1000, and award tickets would not provide good value.

That’s when we started considering the Caribbean, including destinations in Mexico such as Mexico City and Cancun. Ticket prices were expensive, at $700 per person return in basic economy, but award tickets were a little more reasonable. That’s how the search really started…

What we booked: two one-way flights in economy

We booked this trip in two phases. I was checking flights to Mexico City and back essentially daily, both cash and award tickets, using Google Flights and Seats.Aero.

One day a cheap flight from JFK to MEX popped up, flying Aeromexico (a SkyTeam airline), bookable through Virgin Atlantic Flying Club in economy for 11.500 points and $49.44. This seemed like a good deal, so we booked this flight. Even though award tickets are refundable, we did not consider the ticket as such: Virgin has a $100 redeposit fee per person, meaning we’d spend $200 to refund $96.88 and 23000 points… that’s like throwing away two thirds of the value of the ticket… So, we were kind of ‘stuck’ now with going to Mexico City. Finding the flight back was critical… On the bright side, my Flying Blue status should give us priority services and access to the Delta SkyClub at JFK Terminal 4, which is where the Aeromexico flight departs from.

For the flight back, things were a little trickier. There were two options here:

1. My husband would fly back to NYC, and I would fly to Europe to meet my mother for a few days.
2. My husband and I would fly back to NYC together.

My preference was the first option, since my company has a ‘winter break’ and I wanted to maximize that vacation time. Unfortunately, cash ticket prices to fly one way to Europe and then to NYC were expensive, especially if prioritizing SkyTeam airlines, so ultimately I more or less abandoned that idea.

Then a few days ago, a cheap award ticket popped up: 12.500 points plus $106.02 to fly American from MEX to JFK, bookable via Alaska Mileage Plan. This, again, was a good deal, and unlike with Virgin, you can cancel award tickets through Alaska essentially for free (minus a $12.50 partner booking fee). We’re not too excited about flying American, but the schedule works well and it’s hard to beat this price. Plus, because of the low cancellation fee, if I do find attractive fares to Europe, I can cancel the award ticket and adjust my plans (my husband and I booked those tickets separately, precisely for that reason).

This is a good deal for an economy flight!

I’ll be the first to say that you can’t maximize your points value when flying in economy – the best deals are when you fly a premium cabin, in particular business or first, since the cash price for those flights are often in the thousands. This means that the price per point (in cent/point) are maximized for those award tickets.

But, hear me out. While that is the case, you can still get value on your economy tickets – it’s just a little harder to get good value. But, I believe these tickets do the trick. To figure that out, we can calculate the cent/point value of these redemptions.

Let me start by saying that our flight with Aeromexico to Mexico City was with a 25% transfer bonus from Chase to Virgin Atlantic. So, rather than transferring 23.000 Chase points I only transferred 19.000 points, and this gave me 23.750 Virgin Flying Club miles. Taking into account the full prices of the two flights, for both myself and my husband, plus taxes and fees, we spent 44.000 points and $308.92 total.

Given that we booked these flights on very different days, the below Google Flights search will not reflect the prices very well at the time of booking our award tickets, but I do believe it’s probably not so far off. I blacked out the exact details for privacy reasons…

Let’s plug in the values into the formula:

((946-308.92)/44.000) * 100 = 1.45 cent/point

This is a good value for an economy award ticket, given that it’s close to the value that the Chase Sapphire Reserve card would have been able to provide through the Chase travel portal, at 1.5 cent/point (which we currently don’t have).

Now, let’s do this a bit differently. What if we had gone and just booked the cheapest tickets available right now to go to Mexico City? Then this would have been the best option, according to Google Flights:

If we plug in the values with this price, then this is the result:

((790-308.92)/44.000) * 100 = 1.09 cent/point

This is what I would consider the usual value that you’d get if you book an award ticket with points, and is easily beaten by booking your flights with the Sapphire Preferred credit card through the Chase portal, at 1.25 cent/point (which is why I usually recommend booking your flights that way).

However, I should emphasize that both these comparisons, provided above, are for basic economy tickets, while our award tickets automatically price us into ‘standard‘ economy. As such, the price-to-points comparison is not entirely fair. See below the amenity differences between basic economy and standard economy when flying American Airlines:

And Delta punishes you even more for booking a basic economy ticket, as you can see below. I mean, you don’t have get to earn any status-qualifying points (MQD):

Summary

My husband and I will have a short Christmas trip to Mexico City. While the itinerary it still a bit of a work in progress, right now we were able to book award tickets to fly AeroMexico JFK-MEX, and American MEX-JFK, for the price of 44.000 points and $308.92. This is a nice value, especially if you compare to the current cash prices of these exact flights, coming in at 1.45 cent per point. Nice bonuses are the perks that my Flying Blue status will give us when flying Aeromexico, and it’s also nice that the American flight can be easily cancelled in case we find a better deal.