Airline & hotel loyalty programs will often sell miles & points directly to consumers. Some programs just sell points at a price that isn’t particularly lucrative, while other programs constantly have promotions, and generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue per year with this.
Continue reading: When Does It Make Sense To Buy Miles & Points? Here’s How To Decide…
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
Speaking of realistic valuations of redemption points for flights, I prefer to compare them to half the cash rate for a round trip rather than the one-way rate, since one-way tickets are often ridiculously more expensive than the full round-trip fare; and if I were paying with cash, I’d usually book a round trip anyway.
You wrote: "In general you’ll find the most value when booking luxury travel, including first & business class flights, and five star hotels. Why? Because these experiences are generally disproportionately expensive if paying cash, while they might only be marginally more expensive when redeeming points."
My question: Is this still even remotely true given that many companies have moved to dynamic pricing and where there is now a direct correlation being cash price points and miles redemption amounts.
Perhaps I just don't understand the maths...
I just bought 150,000 Aeroplan points for $3,200 Canadian and booked a one way Montreal to Zurich business class fare on Swiss for 80,000 points. The rack rate for that flight is $8,660 Canadian… Aeroplan is the way to go for luxury travel.
I have to disagree with your assessment of the best hotel points program for buying points.
IHG regularly gives you the option to buy points at 0.5 cpp.
We regularly redeem single nights for a value of 0.7 cpp.
Combining that with the four nights for 3 redemption and /or the 10% Select rebate and you get some phenomenal values.
Four nights at the HIX on Hawaii is only 120K points but would cost $1500 with cash.
So even if you don’t have the Select card that is well over 1 cpp versus the cost of 0.5cpp.
Before UA went market rate, this year I was able to book a long and imperfect Business flight to and from BKK from SFO at 115000 Aeroplan points each way for 2 px using the partners awards. One way for example was SFO-LHR-ZRH (overnight) -IST-MCT (overnight) -BKK. Basically arrived 2 days later than the direct flight from YVR. Bags lost because not properly ticketed in IST arrived a day later. No TK lounge as MCT is NOT *A, just Aeroplan. Return flight added a day in MCT because of the Lufthansa strike in Munich.
Booked for next year I paid cash for SEA-NRT-BKK JAL Business. About 20 hours.
This years flight cost 460,000 points (for 2 return) plus two hotel nights or approx $8650 USD. Note - 1 way Aeroplan fare 500,000 points pp (direct). UA now dynamic pricing).
2026 cash flight $7950 via third party, Via NRT both ways but no stopover so a reasonable flight vs two days in the air and 6 stops.
So with dynamic pricing points are often no value where they once were incredible.
OOPs Oman Air is not Star Alliance so no TK lounge in IST (one of the reasons for the routing).