Originally Posted by
will5404
I value Airmiles at $.14 each, for example a Via Rail gift card is 700 air miles for $100 or $.14/mile.
This would be $.105/mile or about 25% worse than some gift card redemptions. I guess it depends how much you need the $$. Personally once I earn enough Airmiles for a $25 or $100 gift cert I redeem them.
That's one of the higher value gift cards. Almost all the others (HBC, Pharmaplus, Metro) are much less. They were devalued again a few months ago when redemption increased to 220 miles (from 175 miles) for a $25 gift card, so I value them at 11.4 cents/mile. So 10.5 cents/mile isn't that far out of line.
BTW, recently found out that 80K HBC pts can be converted into $10 HBC gift cards. This is worth considerably more than when converting them into Air Miles, which would only be 40 Air Miles.