Sean,

Welcome to posting! It's good to have you here.

Some of the exchange rates truly are ludicrous, especially for large quantities of miles. Points.com is useful to me for orphan mile use and for occasionally taking advantage of good deals like newspaper subscriptions or the like.

Sometimes it does feel like points.com is trying to find suckers willing to trade 100,000 miles in one program for 2,000 in another. This is probably more a result of automatic marketing glitz being applied no matter how poor the transfer ratio, but perhaps presenting users with alternatives could help mitigate any appearance of hoodwinking.

Lastly, points.com does not have easily-accessible customer service should something go wrong with a transfer. Getting live assistance is non-trivial.