Had a great vacation on one of those tickets, ORD-LHR-SFO with my wife... as I recall, for the two of us, total was around $390 plus a cheap SFO-ORD to start the trip.

The game just morphs into something new every year... I'm still getting good value. Just keep having to adjust how I play.

Then again, I'd rather have quantity vs. luxury, and can often travel off-peak... so I can still find solid value for coach domestic flights and low-tier hotel properties.

Examples form this month are a 12.5k UA domestic one-way right at 2 CPM and a Marriott Cat 5 voucher when going rate was around $300 due to a conference.

I got a chuckle out of this. We, too, have never spent so much on travel as we do now that it's free.

The game has changed, but with so much of the airline income based upon selling miles to banks, they can't make it too impossible to redeem them. On the other hand, my newbie friends are thrilled to combine miles and cash for r/t for 2 in coach to New Zealand for only $700-1000. They are excited to go and save a little money getting there. I don't burst their bubble.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the airlines/hotels run essentially a bait and switch scheme, where they sell/give out miles at a certain assumed value/valuation and then devalue them frequently as needed to make profits or cut losses. The whole scheme is based on deceiving you to think you get a better value than you actually do.

It still works, IMO, but it�s much harder on the redemption side. You�re only going to get outsized value if you�re a pensioner or work from home and can travel on slow days.

On the other hand, the earning side is much easier, with tons of credit cards and MS opportunities. I�m much better off this way, than actually having to fly for them.

One new thing is the frequent business class sale fares. Pay with bank points at 1.5 and you�re getting the award chart of 5 years ago, net of whatever points your earn on the paid ticket, And no availability issues.

In my opinion at least in the US, the earning side is expanding faster than the redemption side is being devalued. Also, most of the people on this forum skew older but I can tell you I'm 33 and most of my friends are in their 20s and 30s, we mostly have online businesses, some are freelancers, others work for small companies that have remote teams, and even those with traditional "corporate" jobs are now being provided more independence to work from wherever, so its not hard to take one of the 2 or 3 "saver" dates available on a given month. The idea that only retirees or those taking time off their career have travel flexibility is really outdated. Even the term "working from home" has become outdated, as the vast majority of location independent knowledge workers would prefer to work from a coworking space or coffee shop most days as to not go insane from being home alone 24/7.

Now if you are a family looking for 4 roundtrip tickets in J for a specific date to go from a specific city to another specific city across the atlantic or pacific at the "saver" rate, yeah probably not as easy as it was 10-20 years ago I presume, but then again, 10-20 years ago airline programs were made to reward frequent fliers not to make money off transfers from credit cards, so they didn't really care if they would lose a little money because not so many people were booking as points were harder to come by as you could really only get them from flying.

Yes, I agree. Earning side has become much much easier.
And then sometimes, redemptions just work. Just redeemed 8 (EIGHT!) J seats, on the same plane, in the summer, on Swiss JFK--ZRH-KBP, 8 (EIGHT!) J seats on the same plane on AF SVO-CDG-JFK. 600K CapOne points earned from just 2 cards, plus 400K MRs earned on just a few cards too.
A million points for 8 TATL Js - not a bad deal...

I think DL is showing how not-having-a-chart can really be a significant stealth devaluation that upsets the calculations on mileage value. On the free-ticket side, I'm seeing a lot more steep increases (even for times that are off-peak) vs. cuts.

Credit cards and MS are also not the kind of thing you're likely to see the average person doing. I've always maintained that a big part of the reason the FF programs got to be successful is that the INfrequent flyers could hope that maybe they could get enough points for something (like a free trip to Hawaii) after a decade or so of collecting them. That's certainly not like it was.

So arguably we're in the worst of both worlds: Rising award levels demanded (if for no other reason than there's less transparency and less competition), far fewer RDMs for flying on most fares, yet large numbers of miles minted via credit cards still putting pressure on the unredeemed miles vs. available seats situation. Which adds pressure for even more devaluations.

I would say that the earning side has been much easier (past tense), but the trend is toward getting harder. By the month, anti-churning policies and anti-MSing policies at banks are increasing.

A few years ago, there was no once-in-a-lifetime at Amex, there was no 5/24 at Chase.

Now not only is there once-in-a-lifetime (actually only about 7 years), but also all sorts of things that give you popups saying you won't get a signup bonus (canceling or downgrading Amex cards at the wrong time, "sock drawering" Amex cards too much, etc). So wouldn't you say Amex has gotten harder in the past few years?

Meanwhile, Chase started with cards which weren't subject to 5/24, but now they all are. It added some longer waits between bonuses on certain cards.

But the really big news about 5/24 is how many second-tier banks seem to be implementing something similar: BofA, Barclay, etc.

And while Citi may not have completely eliminated the latest of their loopholes for AA cards (mailers), the big news in mailers the past couple weeks is some people getting their AA accounts shut down presumably because of the tricks they pulled to get more mailers. And meantime, in public offers, Citi has gone from 24 to 48 months, though at least it's made it per card rather than per program as it was in the previous implementation.

So I'm not really clear which airline miles are so much easier to get with signup bonuses than a few years ago as of this month.

And on the MSing side, I get the impression (as a watcher, not a participant) that more techniques are falling by the wayside every few months, at a faster rate than new techniques can replace them. And, also, some banks are wising up, and starting to watch for telltale signs of MSing. Amex officially states that you can't earn points any more on gift cards, and while a gift card bought along with groceries at a grocery store here and there may escape attention, buying gift cards from a site by the very same name certainly no longer tends to work at Amex.