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It's an average bloggers come up with based on potential and actual redemptions. They even do really dumb stuff like counting the face value of a seat nobody wo

It's an average bloggers come up with based on potential and actual redemptions. They even do really dumb stuff like counting the face value of a seat nobody would pay cash for. Like "I got this $6,000 seat for 100,000 miles, so they were worth 6 cents per point." What value you personally actually get out of miles is individualized and taking a valuation from a rando blogger at face value is incredibly stupid. Especially from bloggers like The Points Guy (which was linked), because they get kickback when you use their referral links to sign up for credit cards. If you offered me the choice between 10 AA miles and 1,000 Delta miles, I'd choose 10 AA miles, no matter what bloggers say. I'll always use AA miles and I would have trouble doing anything with Delta miles.

jessriedel 10y ago
vmarsy added that link after I wrote my comment, and it clearly doesn't justify his use of the term "best case".
nataz 10y ago
Airline miles are fascinating. For instance, I fly over 100,000 miles per year with one airline alliance which puts me in the highest earning category for earning award points. Essentially they give you a an 11x multiplayer of award miles for every actual mile (domestic, overseas is more complicated). At lower levels it may be be 9x or 7x, etc. That means the difficulty of earning miles scales significantly with frequency, which if course changes the value. Now, rather then trying to figure out the price of a ticket and comparing it to #of miles spent, which is difficult because of black out dates, variable pricing, destination/date premiums, and a ton of other factors, I found out you can just buy gift cards. Specifically, you can buy Amazon gift cards at about 15,000 points per $100 gift card. While not as fungible as USD, given my spending habits and Amazon's large selection, it becomes a pretty good stand in. That means for me, a mile is always worth around 0.006 cents at a minimum. At around 250,000 award miles a year that's around 1,600 dollars per year which isn't that bad. At the very least it's better then some random blogger picking a number based on ticket prices.

jessriedel 10y ago

vmarsy added that link after I wrote my comment, and it clearly doesn't justify his use of the term "best case".

nataz 10y ago

Airline miles are fascinating. For instance, I fly over 100,000 miles per year with one airline alliance which puts me in the highest earning category for earning award points. Essentially they give you a an 11x multiplayer of award miles for every actual mile (domestic, overseas is more complicated). At lower levels it may be be 9x or 7x, etc. That means the difficulty of earning miles scales significantly with frequency, which if course changes the value. Now, rather then trying to figure out the price of a ticket and comparing it to #of miles spent, which is difficult because of black out dates, variable pricing, destination/date premiums, and a ton of other factors, I found out you can just buy gift cards. Specifically, you can buy Amazon gift cards at about 15,000 points per $100 gift card. While not as fungible as USD, given my spending habits and Amazon's large selection, it becomes a pretty good stand in. That means for me, a mile is always worth around 0.006 cents at a minimum. At around 250,000 award miles a year that's around 1,600 dollars per year which isn't that bad. At the very least it's better then some random blogger picking a number based on ticket prices.