Do any of the big travel bloggers (or little ones!) have such info in one place, with perhaps the logic they used to assign CPM or other valuation method to the program points/miles? Curious to see someone's table that accounts for several major airline and hotel loyalty programs for a bit of side by side perspective to bounce against my own perceptions.

frequentmiler.com

http://boardingarea.com/blogs/freque...rading-prices/

These prices are MUCH too low for most programs. There's no way CO miles are only worth 1.31 cents per mile, nor is there any reason why American or US Airways miles are valued more. And SPG at under 2 cents? Please...

They are priced according to what what it costs to can easily get them, not redemption value.

Exactly. These are the prices people pay for points / miles using the best available common option. Usually, people buy miles by putting spend on a points earning credit card. The values in the chart are determined by assuming that when someone spends with a point/mile earning card, they are giving up 2 cents per dollar that they could have gotten by using a 2 percent back card. If you follow the links on the referenced page, there are better/more complete explanations.

It is much harder to estimate redemption value since that will be all over the board. Are you redeeming for domestic flights, international, coach, business, first class? Are you redeeming well in advance or last minute, etc. all of these things have a huge impact on how much value you can get from redeeming points.

Frequent Miler, thanks for explaining the chart so well. I agree, it is almost IMPOSSIBLE to make one that is a basis for what people value their miles at. So many factors play in to it. Sure, you have the basic stuff that is the same for everyone (how much flights costs, does it have fuel surcharge or not, etc) but really, everyone is different. If you live at a United hub, well then they are much more valuable. If you live at an AA hub, well there you go, AA is better for you. Same with hotels. Does little good to have hotel points if you travel to places without those hotels.

So yeah, I think it would be possible for people to make a personal chart, unique to them, which is what I think the OP was asking, but almost impossible for a catch all chart that everyone would fit in to.

Yep. Although it would be helpful if someone could gather enough data to be able to show averages of different types. For example, with hotels, someone could calculate the value of using points at a large set of, say, top tier hotels for random days across the year and then publish a chart that shows the low, average, and high value of points for each hotel tier. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be good for looking across hotel chains to see the relative value of their points.

done already. boardingarea.com - Look at loyalty traveler analysis

And even if you did have data to compile some sort of redemption value comparison, the utility of the data may or may not be that great. There are other factors like inventory availability, regions that are better served by one or another program; partner availability; etc

I think Frequent Flyer did a good job with the point valuation, but one thing that adds or reduces value of the points is also how easy/hard it is to get the points.

For Ex: My trading value for Delta is 1.1 cents just because it was very easy to transfer to friends and family for 1.1 cents all last year. Most on FT will also agree that they dont transfer MR straight to Delta unless there is a 40%~66% bonus promo which happened often last year as well.

Yes thats it. I wanted to compare the logic, process, inputs and results from more experienced FFers to my own loosely held assessments, which are based mainly on inter-program transfer ratios and redemption costs under for my preferred redemption choices.

A good starting point is www.miles.biz. You enter the origin and destination and it tell you the number of miles needed in each class of service for pretty much every FF program. It is a very useful tool.

Maybe I should add another column to the table for this sort of thing (Delta 1.1 cents, Priority Club .6 cents, etc.). You can see a debate about this here: http://boardingarea.com/blogs/freque...nts-and-miles/

I'll publish one right here. I specifically did not use cash as the baseline value because that always sidetracks into discussion of under/over valuation of miles in general. Using United miles as the baseline value of 1:

UA 1
AA .95
DL .70
US .80
WN 1.15
BA .80
NH 1.05
SPG 1.40
Hyatt .90
Hilton .40
Marriott .60
Amex 1.1

My personal valuation, with united at 100

United 100
American 70
Delta 85
Alaska 85
US Airways 95
Aeroplan 80
British Airways 50-55
ANA 85-90
Qantas 40-45
Chase UR 110
Amex MR 90 (assuming no xfer bonuses)
SPG 190-220

IMO American and BA miles are way overvalued by most.