There is nothing wrong with using miles at not very high values if that suits where you are going and more ambitious travel is not in the picture. Once you have redeemed that 90,000 miles to get to Europe the rest of the trip is not necessarily cheap. In fact hotel and airline redemptions may only be a small part of total travel budgets, excepting perhaps that tiny fraction of miles earners who have so many millions of miles they can't figure out how to dump them all. The people who visited Grandma may well have covered 100% of the cost of the trip. Granted with clever planning they might have parlayed the benefit into two trips.,