Korean Air Skypass Value

Korean Air’s Skypass program is of particular interest to US based travelers holding Chase issued Ultimate Rewards. They, like many other foreign carreirs, offer decent award availability on their own metal, and relatively poor award space on codeshare parteners. Somewhat unique to Korean Air is the fact that they seem to offer better redemption options to those seeking a premium cabin seat than those seeking an economy class one. Typically, this would result in a high value, however, the lack of lower level availability takes it’s toll. This month, we’re assinging an ACRV of $0.0109 per Korean Air Skypass mile.

Annoyingly, Korean Air only permits round-trip award redemptions for flights on partner airlines. So, much like we did with ANA’s valuation, we simply cut the fees/award miles required in half to plug into our one-way formulas. Sloppy, we know.

In what might be a programming error or a deliberate attempt to dissuade partner award redemptions via Korean Air’s portal, we’re frequently greated by the following error:

We’re not really sure what all that means. But the fact that we couldn’t proceed means that no award availability actually exists. Remember, we only use real, bookable awards.

The chart above shows a story of high-highs and low-lows. We had a total of 18 redemptions in our exceptional/great/good categories. This is outstanding. We also had 38 hypothetical redemptions with no availability, this is terrible. Our best redemption for the month came from a Hong Kong to San Francisco first-class ticket offered for 80,000 miles plus $86.60 in fees. The lowest priced non-cash alternative was $6,123, giving us a redemption value of $0.075…phenomenal. To add icing to this cake, one would be flying in Korean’s fantastic Kosmo “suite”.

For more information about how we value airline/hotel and other award currencies, please visit our valuation method and changelog pages.