Originally Posted by
canadiancow
An EYW payout, including the 1 million, plus all the points for the wings, plus the Aeroplan miles for actual flights, plus the SE bonus (~1.3M), lasts me less than 12 months. I've been pretty consistently burning through ~1.8M per year for the last few years. My current balance is in the 1.7 range, but I have, for example, a 2 pax SFO-TYO F round trip booked for later this year, so I'm counting that in my runway.
Flights may be reduced, but that doesn't mean I won't be picking up my typical travel schedule as soon as borders open. And I think the optics of doing EYW when there is still any kind of risk from COVID-19 is going to be problematic. I don't think they won't "want" to run it to encourage more travel, but if you thought "hey come burn fuel for fun" was bad, "hey come sit within 6 inches of a stranger" is going to be worse.
For some reason, I thought you said you were burning more like 1.1-1.2 a year the other night.
So in normal circumstances, you have about a year's worth of miles in the account.
I don't doubt you'll be back to travelling as soon as things open up. But I think that with various quarantines, border restrictions, etc, it could be a very gradual opening. So maybe you'll be able to do a trip to Canada in June or July, but I suspect there will be a lot fewer opportunities to, say, fly LH F to Europe for a few days in August or September.
So I don't doubt you'll be burning some points, but could your burn rate be down by 50% or more for a while, potentially?
I can easily redeem my miles at 3-4 US cents per mile for trips I would actually otherwise pay for. So if we take the low end of that (3), and redemptions are devalued such that I need x times the current miles to redeem, then I need an investment that can do 3/x before I redeem this, which would likely be by the middle of 2022 at the latest.
I was going to say let's estimate x at an obnoxious value of 2, but I think that's too obnoxious, so let's go with 1.5. Does an investment exist that can do 200% in 2 years? Definitely. Can I find it more easily than I'm willing to bet on my travel picking up by then and x<=1.5? I'm not so sure about that. And I think x will be a fair bit less than 1.5.
Not an unreasonable way of looking at it. I would just add that, while a massive devaluation is somewhat unlikely, the talk seems to be more and more around dynamic pricing, and a devaluation could be
really awful from that perspective. Have you ever tried to redeem SkyMiles? It's a joke. So you might be in a situation where you're having to find rewards only with partner space in order to benefit from a devalued partner award chart (e.g. 150K points to Europe in J, maybe?), but without the ability to enjoy IKK or YQ waiver on any segments, or pay some stupid price (250K points on AC metal to Europe in J?) to enjoy IKK and YQ waiver.
All speculative, of course, but hard to do anything else when they've given us very little clarity on what the program will look like.
But I am (obviously) putting a lot of thought into this.
That's all I'm trying to encourage. Doing the same myself
Originally Posted by
canadiancow
My general advice to people debating spending thousands of dollars on something like this is that if you need someone else to tell you it's worth it, it's not.
I have to agree and reiterate this advice. Those of us who are experienced at earning and burning miles can get comfortable with the risk of a big purchase like this, but for someone less sophisticated, there's a much higher risk of coming to regret it.
Originally Posted by
jasdou
This could be an opportunity for those with the Amex Platinum card to take advantage of the Double Rewards promo, to effectively convert Amex MR points to Aeroplan at a higher rate than normal.
Normally, you could convert 100,000 Amex MR points to 100,000 Aeroplan miles if you wanted to, at no extra cost.
Now, taking advantage of the 115% bonus miles sales, you can buy those 100,000 miles for 0.014CAD per mile, meaning the purchase will cost you 1400 CAD. You can then redeem Amex MR points against this purchase, at a rate of 1000 points : 20 CAD, which means you would need 70,000 Amex MR points to offset the 1400 CAD purchase. Effectively, this means you can convert Amex MR points to Aeroplan miles at a rate of 1:1.4 if you go down this route. I have omitted the sales taxes but you can adjust the numbers as needed depending on your local tax regime.
The downside is that you are losing out on the Travel at Home promo because if you transfer directly MR -> AE, 100% of the transferred miles count towards the milestones, whereas with this route, only 50% of the purchased miles would count (roughly 23k in my example).
Interesting concept, I really hadn't thought about it that way