once again, AS is not "gifting" any miles to BofA... BofA never has any possession of AS miles. bonuses, and earned miles are directly awarded by AS to their FFP members once they get a monthly statement from BofA.... you could argue AS is gifting bonuses to its card holders, but once again thats called a sign up bonus. it just works differently compared to other partnerships.

AS may have $295 million in Mileage Plan revenue from sources outside of passenger flights -- that includes selling miles directly and you should be aware how aggressively they market and promote these sales. and once again also by collecting AFs, IC fees, and every other kind of fee on their affinity card acc to BofA reps goes directly to AS.
p.s. once that is collected every month, is when they update your mileage balance if you earn thru CC spending.

that is why AS is very keen on you paying your AFs and keeping the card long term (where they hope to recoup their initial bonus investment) rather than you opening and closing constantly which churners might do with other banks. this is why BofA doesnt offer ANY retention bonuses at all on this product. not because they dont wanna keep you around, but cause it is not really their product to retain you for. i.e. they dont have miles to give or any leeway with AF which once again go directly to AS, so they wont take the loss on that.


what I mean by swept aside is that the value even as a liability doesnt affect their day to day operation. it can be put aside for all intents and purposes. as if it was a separate entity (think of how aeroplan works in relation to air canada) and once agian they could decide to get rid of all of mileageplan. would they be $730M richer? no because this entity doesnt really exist/is not tangible. it has to be thought of us something totally out of thin air and a pure profit center... lastly, let me also clarify why a valuation of $.005 is meaningless even as part of their SEC filing. say I have $100 million in monopoly money. I assign them, solely at my own discretion, a value of $10 million USD. does that make my monopoly notes worth $10M USD to anyone else, esp when this currency cant be used anywhere, nor can it be owned by anyone else?

thats the issue with FFP miles, the program owns them at all times. AS may have come up with this valuation based on how their members redeem these miles and taking the avg costs of all awards (as if they woulda been sold for cash at that given moment) ... acc to one chart that was posted: a vast majority of AS miles are redeemed on AS metal, followed by AA and DL. intl partners aka long haul awards make up something like 3% of their total redemptions. I'd wager J/F intl long-hauls would be an even smaller subset of that. simply due to the fact that most folks dont have a ton of miles to splurge on anything besides Y. this is also why its AS is more suspicious these days when a 100 or 150k miles suddenly appear in your acct. whether thru card bonuses or SPG transfer, acc to all the reports we see on FT.

anyways, so overall based on previous trends that AS has data for, perhaps 1 AS mile is worth $.005 to create and be redeemed. or maybe thats a random, round valuation as a placeholder that AS came up with cause regulators require something, anything to be put down for the books.
but it can be changed at any time. it can be devalued at any time. even more dramatically than how any given central bank devalues currencies via inflation programs. for ex. the feds quantitative easing program after the great recession. difference being atleast you "own" your money at all times, even if its digital, in a bank account and doesnt physically exist.