Dan,
if you dont pay for flights out of pocket, and you dont use your miles for short trips(domestic), how fo you fly domestically?
well if Dan never purcahsed any tkts then he wouldnt beable to be Silver on CO or whatever he is on FL (AirTrans)
As for getting 5 cents per mile. there are 2 ways to look at it. 1- the price of the tkt divided by the number of miles needed for a free tkt, and 2- how much will it be cost per EQM if purchased. TLV is 1 of the worst places to earn to, very rarely will it be below 9-10 cents per EQM.
Then again what Must be taken into consideration is the \price of the tkt that you would have purchased with your $$ and not what the price is of the Class you flew.
So Id never buy a Biz tkt anywhere, so when I want to decide if its worth using my miles. I simply see what a Coach tkt would cost me. So if a tkt in coach to TLV is $800 or 75k in miles, the fact that I can get a Biz tkt for 11k when the Biz fare is say $4000 doesnt come into play since I never would pay the $4k. So I then see I used 115k to save $800. Of cause not much to Brag about and it sounds much better beng able to say I saved $4k but unless you are willing to buy a $4k tkt all you really saved IMO, is whatever the price would hav ebeen for a Coach tkt
That said, Biz is far better to be sitting then Coach and not bad for 115k