Originally Posted by
jeautk01
I agree. I think the big lie that bloggers put forward is that for leisure flyers points are worth anything close to 2cpm. They never talk about the downside such as award availability or routing. You have a pretty deep understanding to get a 2 cpm return that involves a class of service you would normally buy and destinations or routes you would choose. Saying you just spent 100,000 miles to get a $8000in flight is ridiculous b/c you wouldn't pay that normally. Most people would do better booking the cheapest possible flight and using the Fidelty card to get 2% and maximizing the category bonuses on Discover and Freedom. Now for business owners and flyers that pay out of their own pocket yes you can get 2cpm and possibly even more, but 99 out of 100 bloggers are targeted at the leisure side of it. AS for card churning which is 90% of the bloggers focus you can get pretty good returns but even if you max out the cards, the infinite days of apps are pretty much over, there is a limit to miles from bonuses (admittedly its a lot of miles, but the blogs present it as endless)
I do believe there are some really good bloggers out there.^
You make valid points, and I'm constantly asking myself whether I'd be better off just using a 2% cashback card whenever I'm not meeting a spend requirement for a big bonus. The calculation of the value of redemptions has so many variables, though. I redeemed 60,000 miles for tickets that United offered to me for cash for $9,000. There's no way I'm valuing my redemption at 15 cpm, since I'd never pay that much for the tickets. Yet it's a trip I very much am excited to be taking, and would not be able to if the miles didn't make it possible. So the fact that the miles can be used for it makes them worth significantly more than 2 cpm to me (I would without hesitation pay over $1,200 in cash). One thing that makes a true valuation difficult is that there is no way to determine what I actually theoretically would pay in cash, because that trip could never be available for cash in my price range. It really does depend on what types of redemptions one makes.