With BAEC the points required for award are distance based. You only need 9K points for round trip award for short haul flights (less than 650 miles). You can redeem one way award for as low as 4500 points. For this reason I suggested getting BAEC accounts and pooling the points into family account so that hopefully you have enough points for a reward or two even if you don't fly that much.

If you willing to spend some time and learn about the credit card / miles, then it is completely a different scenario.