<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by redbeard911:
If that same trip is now regularly $750, and the award is 25K miles, now you have to take 5 trips, but only have to spend $3750 for an award.
Where's the inflation? (or devaluation?)
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You are assuming in your example that tickets are cheaper today than they were last year. Does a ticket that used to cost $1000 really only cost $750 now? I'm not so sure that, on average, tickets are cheaper today than they used to be. For example, I've been watching the price of HNL-West Coast and HNL-Asia fares for over ten years now. On average, I would say that the ticket prices have gradually been going
up.
If you fly the same amount this year as you did last year, and spend about the same amount of money for those tickets (possibly more due to true inflation), but are now reaping fewer rewards for that same amount of flying, then the miles have been devalued.