Tino makes some good points which I don't disagree with.

singlemalt lists many of the factors that concern me about the explosion in the number fo miles outstanding and how this devalues our miles.

Tinos' point is that this does not necessariliy make the accounting wrong, because the airline controls the redemptions. I agree.

However, it does make the accounting shady IMHO. This is because the airlines are trying to induce you to fly their airline in exchange for these points, and they don't disclose how hard it is to redeem awards or how hard it will be in the future to redeem awards.

What they fail to disclose is the number of miles outstanding. They take this number, apply certain assumptions which seem reasonable, and then disclose (in DL's case) that they expect 10 million award flights to be redeemed, and they value the cost of those flights at $22.80 each. Its impossible to gauge the reasonableness of their assumptions without knowing the missing data. For example, DL concludes 10 million awards will be redeemed. If you assume 25K miles per award, thats 250 billion miles. But is this figure half of the total outstanding? One -tenth? Who knows how agressive the airline is at applying its assumptions.

What I would like to know is the number of miles outstanding and the growth trend on my carrier. From what I can see, I expect redemptions to get increasingly more difficult. And with respect to Randy, I don't think his view is the be-all end-all, in part because the airlines are his customers. Perhaps he's just an optimist and doesn't believe they'll kill the goose that lays the golden egg, but I'm not so optimistic.