Originally Posted by
farnorthtrader
If you are using them at 0.3 to 0.4 cents per point, you are wasting your points. I have booked 3 hotels in Italy and Austria for this month, which is pretty much as off season as you can get and have gotten 0.59, 0.63 and 0.95 cents per point. Being able to use cash and points under the old system might have allowed me to leverage for higher values if it had been available, but I still would never use points for a stay that only got me 0.3 to 0.4 cents per point.
That's a generalized statement based on your specific experiences. For those of us who don't travel to Italy or Austria, we may not be able to get the same redemption values you do. The other factor is the longer we hold points, the more their value decreases (much faster than the rate of inflation of the USD), so there's an incentive to burn them when it makes vague sense to do so. I value these points at 0.35 cents per point. If I happen to get 0.5 to 0.6, I'm very happy.