As usual, I’m online, checking out flights. I do this a lot. After all, you never know when a deal might pop up, right? Besides, it helps me keep track of just what flights are costing these days.

And yes, we use United. It usually goes where we need to go, and we have a charge card that gives us perks. Some suggest this is not the way to travel, but this is how we do it and it’s doubtful we’ll change now!

So the past few days I’ve been looking at a particular itinerary. I try different ways of paying (cash or miles), and I look at different levels of seats, from economy (NOT basic economy, but the next level) all the way to business class.

A recent flight gave me these dollar options for two legs of a flight, showing economy, premium economy, business, & business fully refundable:

For miles it was 234k plus $155.20 in cash per person. There are other things to check though: how many “PQP” (personal qualifying points) will we each get? How many miles? If you pay with miles you get no miles and fewer PQP. I’m not sure we want to do that at the moment.

But the price? Not bad, I thought, but what about adding one more leg to this? Well … understandably the price went up:

And of course a higher price for three legs rather than two makes perfect sense. I get it.

BUT … while we might want better seats on two legs, we don’t need that on the final leg. We can easily do economy. The insane thing is that choosing the time we’d most likely want to come home this is what I see:

We’d be better off going all business! I’ve yet to understand why they do this, but they do. A lot.

Granted, there were other options that would get us home at decent times:

BUT … if, instead, we choose the very first combo above, we can then choose a one way ticket home for these prices:

I ran everything through, as if to buy tickets, doing business on the first two legs and economy on the last, and one way of doing it, separating the last leg, came to $8,394.10 and doing it with everything lumped together came to $12,446.38. In addition I did check the miles cost, although I knew it was unlikely we’d opt for that for now.

I also must note that f you pay for flights with miles you can add a “free” flight if you do it the right way. If we fly, for instance, from SFO to somewhere in Europe we have to pay, but if you then fly from somewhere in Europe to somewhere else in Europe, that flight won’t cost you any miles, but just the dollar amount in taxes that have to be paid (in the one I plugged in we would have had an addition $40 or so to pay). Then miles are used again for coming home to the US. But you have to have a good number of miles to play that game.

And THIS is why I have to play with flight plans so much before we actually decide what we will be doing.

My brain hurts.