The US3 airlines are still devaluing the frequent flyer miles during this pandemic. Doesn’t motivate me to give them more business, rather the opposite.

They won’t end the FFPs as long as they can squeeze more money out of the banks and investors/lenders being interested in the programs.

exactly, credit cards

Agree, I have zero motivation to use any cards that earn miles tied to a specific airline, and already cancelled my DL Amex (which i only acquired for the signup bonus). All my spend goes 100% to cards that earn Chase UR, Amex points, or 2% cash back, except for hotel cards offering bonus spend promos.

However airlines are unlikely to change their stripes unless it costs them money. And it won't cost them money until customers start dumping airline cards and stop using airline cards in droves.

Funny how it works.

Times are good: Miles get devalued.
Times are bad: Miles get devalued.

Funny how it works:

Times are good. There's inflation with cash.
Times are bad. There's inflation with cash.

But the big difference I see between inflation and devaluation: People talk about a quantified degree of inflation. It can go up or down, it can be high or low or ver low, but it's pretty much never 0, which it would need to be to say that there is "no" inflation. People don't just say "there's inflation again this year", they talk about how much of it there is.

But hardly anyone ever quantifies devaluation. Are you really scared of 0.2% inflation, or only of something like 50% inflation? Well, should you be scared of all devaluation, if you have no idea of how it's quantified?

I've been collecting miles and points for close to two decades now, and I'm hard pressed to find cases where devaluation has been that high cumulatively at most programs over that time. Occasionally when a program changes radically (Southwest going from credits to points, Delta going way beyond chartless quite a few years ago) devaluation can be more sizeable, but in most cases it's just a semi-steady march, just like inflation is.

Meanwhile, I don't know if it will continue (it's already slowed down for many due to banks' anti-churning measures), but the ability to earn miles through non-flying grew at a faster pace for many years, in many programs, than the value of those miles devalued.

But if you can't earn that fast any more, that brings up another question: Will the miles you have devalue so much that it's not worth hanging onto them (but only worth it to "use them up" at a poor redemption value)? Ie, you have to compare the amount of devaluation to the poorer redemptions you can do right now, to evaluate that question. But if all you know is that there's devaluation, but you can't quantify it, how can you make rational decisions about how to react to it? :confused:

I think that FFPs will grow in popularity in coming 5 years. As airline struggle to fill seats, they will make them available via air miles bookings.

As the economy improves and demand picks up for flights, they won't need as many air miles bookings. At that point, we'll get back to "air miles devalations" and "program enhancements"

At that point, we will all come back to FT and complain that airlines don't value our loyalty!

There is an interesting panel debate in this podcast on the topic of the value and loyalty of FFP's - both seen from the customers point of view but also from the airlines point of view.

They state that it will continue to be popular but the fact is that the customers must get use to that the value of miles/points will be lower and also the fatc that the redemption on award tickets will most likely get lowered or partly replaced to other things.

And that means less reason to collect frequent flyer miles from credit cards (as opposed to flights). Why go out of my way to earn frequent flyer miles that must be redeemed on other things than flights when I can get the ultimate in flexibility via a 2% cash back card? Cash can be redeemed on EVERYTHING.

I am majorly frustrated at the moment because I rashly invited some friends along on a trip to Greece this fall, thinking I could use my miles to get us over there; I have enough for Business Class for all three of us going over, but not enough for Business Class coming back. If they take up my offer to accompany me on the trip, the absolute best I will be able to manage for the return is Premium Economy, and that will be a stretch. In the past I've always traveled solo, and haven't found miles too hard to use, but things change as soon as you have companions - and most people travel with family, I suspect. That really cuts the value prospect of miles. First World problem, I know.

[QUOTE=mahasamatman;31324302]They may have points, but very few are lucrative.

How do you quantify ( or even know ? It could be they cost but that might have a lower cost than not having a loyalty scheme, it might cost 500K per year but increases sales that out strips that.
Even with all the numbers available, its still a subjective assesment. So thats for one program, how can you possibly say few of them are lucrative, how many have been anylized and with what metrics ?

Are you sayin most companies are just happy to throw away money ?

Possibly one of the worts reseached, US centric, headline gabbing, unsusbstantive "expert" out there. Millions do care.

So in other words, FFP's are incredibly popular !!

Yep using 90k miles for 3 people is 30k per person.

Delta and American both want around 300k per person for one-way business class tickets! :eek: Alas, I simply don't have 900,000 SkyMiles or AAdvantage miles, so that's out. But with such ridiculous redemption prices added to the hassles of finding available ff tickets and the inferior schedules and routings such tickets usually have, it's getting harder to justify not just buying the cheapest suitable ticket with cash.

At least in the US with 2-6% cash back in the picture with card use, airline miles from bank card use are even more out of the picture for me than they already were.

And airline miles earning from flight tickets for award flight tickets are increasingly just bad background music for me. Why? Because the airline rebate currency of miles/points are of such questionable value that collecting them from flight tickets for flight tickets is like storing casino chips from a casino that cheats so badly — by artificially worsening odds for all but the casino — that most all the casino customers in the know have left and the residual customers are not sufficient to keep the crooked casino in business like it used to be.