Is the award game dying?
 

I consider myself fairly competent in the awards game. Up until recently, we traveled with our two teenage kids extensively, and having to redeem 3-4 trips/yr, 4 seats in J on same plane, very inflexible dates due to work and school, to a variety of TATL/TPAC destinations - you gotta learn the rules.

But lately I'm finding that award prices have gone up, and revenue prices have gone down, and maybe miles don't make as much sense anymore.

Cases in point - recent trip to JFK-BOG-CUZ, LPB-LIM-BOG-JFK. $1100 in J on Avianca, would have been at least 100K on ANA plus taxes, way more on UA/AC. 1cent per AmEx MR at best, would be way less with Chase UR.
Looking at SE Asia next Feb, NYC-PEK-RGN, HAN-PEK-NYC. $1875 on AirChina, Cheapest is 136K on ANA +$331 in taxes. Again, around 1.1 cpp for Amex, way less with Chase UR.
Next summer, JFK-KPB. Aroudnd $2k on LOT or Finnair. Finnair isn't even available, LOT has 1 seat available ( I need 8). That one is not bad with ANA at 2cpm, but not a homerun either.
And I'm not even talking about hundreds of thousands of SkyPesos sitting in my accounts for years, that I can't find a good redemption for.

I get that Avianca and AirChina both suck, and redeeming on better airlines is going to be a better value ... but still...
I've never used CSR Pay with Points or AmEx Plat points rebate, but both look like really attractive propositions right now.

I don't know about "dying", but I do believe that airlines and hotels around the world are trying to gradually walk back the level of benefits they provide through loyalty programs. At one time, a good loyalty program was a differentiator. Now they're table stakes, and since the competitive advantage of a good one is minimal anymore, they're hoping to mostly in lockstep draw down the costs and emphasis on the programs.

One big change in recent years is that they've figured out that it's more profitable to sell J/F to individuals then dangle them as awards/upgrades. 20 years ago, they sold the seats to corporations with 40-50% discounts, and gave the rest of the inventory to FF members. Since many corporations don't buy them anymore, they've actually started pricing the seats at rates that can sell without the 40-50% discount. (Your $1100 to South America being a good example.)

I still use miles opportunistically. We do about one family trip a year that has 3 or 4 total destinations, and we often mix revenue + award just based on fares and availability. We have 4 seats together in premium economy on CX next year using AS miles, with some short paid segments within Asia.

The game is always evolving. And it's not straight-line worse: 20 years ago, many programs didn't have one-way award options. Now nearly all do, which has vastly increased redemption permutations making it actually easier to find *something*, even as it's hard to find precisely the route you hoped for.

I would say the game is getting harder, but not dying. Like you, I took my kids all over the world for 20 years on awards, forced to travel on school breaks. Planning 330 days in advance (staying up to call just after midnight) it was easy to get 3 tickets to the Caribbean for 25,000 (?) each.

On the upside, bonus offers are much richer today. I recently got 100,000 UR points on an Ink Card. I remember being excited getting 5000 Aadvantage miles for a new MCI account back in the 1990s.

I find it very hard to find business awards to Europe from NY now even with wide open dates. I plan on looking at buying coach and upgrading with miles. Not sure it that will be any better.

That won't be any better. It seems like upgrade availability is harder than award (or equal, if not the identical availability bucket). But what *should* be better is your ability to buy restricted-J at a "sane" revenue price, something that you couldn't do 15-20 years ago.

Totally agree with your point that the credit card game is where a ton of the action is. Other non-financial partners are kind of lame these days. 500 miles for a rental car? Yay.

Agree with both of you guys. Lots of opportunities to rack up tons of points with financial partners. Which is kind the reason for my post.
I'm currently sitting on 2.7M miles and points in different alliances/airlines/hotels/banks, but am booking a trip for cash.
If the game is changing, maybe I should change too. I've always been an opportunistic miles collector, always going for the biggest payout, thinking that with a family of 4, I'll find use for those miles at some point. For many of our trips recently, it just hasn't been the case.

The "game" may very different for someone always trying to get 4 seats together than for someone always flying solo. If you use something like ExpertFlyer which for some (not all) airlines shows the number of award and upgrade seats available, you'll see that for advance booking on those airlines it's most often 3 or 2 or 1 when it's not 0, much more rarely 4 to 7 (typically the highest number a reservation system can show). (Those 4 to 7 numbers may be more common for last-minute upgrades or awards, but they're far from guaranteed, and most people with fixed schedules can't gamble that award availability will appear at the last minute in both flight directions.)

I think all the mergers are to blame, first and foremost. We're down to only three big legacies now in the U.S., and we saw with both the automakers in the 70s and the big 3 TV networks in the era before cable that you could have lots of bad product and not enough competition if you had only three major players.

Combined with a recovery in demand after the great recession, it has meant lots of very deliberate attempts to cut benefits, so much so that ULCCs can claim now that THEY have more generous programs for most people and especially for mostly leisure travelers.

I'm told that hotels are a similar story with the mergers. I never got to play the hotel game because most miles were self-funded at budget level.

What really should be the final straw is if airlines do like Delta and eliminate charts, as that could mask a really significant devaluation for the free trips. You've also got lowest tier sometimes going to BE, which means more exposure to middle seats and bag fees. Just crummy for the customer all around. I'm glad I spent the miles when I did rather than waiting.

You could argue that they're trying to bring the seats available more in line with the unredeemed miles out there, except that they're still issuing the credit-card ones and any that are bought by third parties right and left.

Are you able to book all eight seats at the lowest fare?

award game is not dying by any means, it is evolving, just look at how much the airlines and hotels are making off selling miles and points. and if cant redeem you skymiles, then your not doing it right, I rarely redeem any miles for less than 2 cpm, I been sitting on millions of miles for decades, just redeem half a million miles for $24K flights this summer, and yes cash is sometimes king, like las-atl-ctg for $390 in F ow during peak times next year

I'd say it's evolving but definitely in danger of dying, especially given all of the over-exposure this site (and blogs) have contributed to.
The "game" requires there to be non-players involved as well as players.. if everyone is trying to game the system, then it's not going to work for anyone. It becomes a race to see who can game first, rather than who games at all.
What it comes down to is choosing your circle of gamers carefully -- and keeping that circle closed.

Si, exactamente! Las frutas are not as rich as before but there are still some juicy ones. We can only share this knowledge with people to trust. I was reading here since many years ago and learned many things but when I post I do not share the maximum. There is no point. In reality at the moment such knowledge is shared the technique is shut down and everyone must lose. The most difficult the technique is best because it is not accessible to uneducated bloggers and therefore it is not so visible to the FFP. But I will propose something.... Con USFP primero busca ITA /f bc=Y y llama para reservar porque los resultados estan bien y no solo por AS :)

Getting 2 business class for international travel is certainly getting more difficult. But for the last 40 years or so I have never been completely unable to get those seats when I want them.

Credit card issuers have started to wise up and put limitations on bonuses. But those bonuses still exist. (Modesty prevents my mentioning where you might find them...)

The game is still worth playing

You need to be a better player, that's for sure! And even then, wins aren't as massive anymore.

This reminds me of the poker boom. In 2003-06, everbody got started playing online poker, predominantly Texas Holdem. Most players were terrible. If you weren't stupid and followed the most basic suggestions from the online poker forum 2+2, you could make decent money.

A huge community on 2+2 developed. Blogs sprang up. Tons of poker books were released. Online, for-pay poker coaches running training sites (with training vids) sprang up. Commercial software tools such as PokerTracker and Holdem Manager got released.

And the boom came to an end. Many casual players slowly lost interest. By 2010 or 2012, on a poker table of 8 or 9, there were like 7 decent players trying to get the money of like 0-2 bad players. After factoring in the rake (the casino's take), it was hard to stay profitable even at small stakes.

Obviously, the miles & points game is a different one. Poker is a zero-sum game (i.e., one person can only win what another loses), the miles & points game is not.

But I still see it as a good analogy. Blogs have gotten huge and thrive on ref-linking. There is a blogger economy. Some blogs such as TPG can support staff of like 10+ people.

Commercial sites that charge you for miles & points advice have emerged. Extremehoteldeals has gone for-pay. Jack's Flight Club has a premium subscription. There are for-pay sites First Class & More and Upgrade Guru (German language). Commercial tools like expertflyer are available.

And airlines and hotels responded to all this:
- The majority of airline programs have reduced mileage earning (a mile is not a mile anymore).
- Consequently, mileage running is rarely worthwhile anymore due to spend-based earning of redeemable miles or low table-based earning for cheap fares.
- Furthermore, airlines are more likely to cancel error fares (perhaps not surprisingly since news about these spreads faster and more people try to utilize them).
- Airlines and hotels cut down on elite benefits (e.g., some elite benefits aren't granted when booking a cheap fare).
- More and more carriers got/get rid of award tables. An award may now cost obscene amount of miles.
- Hotel programmes aren't quite there yet, but have also flattened the value of points by introducing peak and off-peaking pricing (e.g., Marriott).
- Other hotel programs simply go the route of restricting award inventories to prevent people from getting outsized value on redemptions.


IMO, the two most significant changes when it comes to the award game are:
- The abolishment of the concept "one miles flown equals one redeemable mile" basically killed mileage running. (Most threads in the MR forums are now either good deals or status run. It quite rare anyone books a MR deal just for the redeemable miles.)
- Poor availability or high prices of redemption options. Either airlines control award inventory strictly and/or they have abolished award tables, thereby making awards unavailable or financially unattractive.

So, I think, the award game is mostly dead. There are other parts of the hobby which are still alive. It's still worthwhile to hunt for cheap fares (but not for MR purposes but to actually use them to get somewhere you wanna go!). Status runs are still worthwhile for some. You can still do some optimizations when it comes to earning and redeeming, alright.

Look at FT today. What is it good for? It is helpful for finding good routes, seats, decent hotels, announcements of sales, info about destinations, interlining rules, general newbie suggestions (what are my elite perks in program x? how can I change this ticket? may I build in a stopover with that fare?), and so on. There seems very little content which is about the awards game anymore.

Sorry for the tl;dr

Yes, miles award tickets are more expensive than before. But then, miles bonuses for such things as credit cards have also inflated. And often there are good miles reward flight sales, especially from Delta.

I fly on miles award tickets 2 -3- times internationally in business class, and I still have more miles in my accounts each year that for the year before. I simply do what I tell my readers to do.

Holding points/miles over the past few years has basically been being short yield management technology, with about the same result as being short any big data/predictive analytics technology.

Fundamentally for airlines and hotels, the point price is determined by: (p*m + (1 - p)*r))/c, where p is the probability the seat/room wouldn't have sold, m is the marginal cost, r is the expected cash revenue if the seat sold, and c is an internal cash/point valuation. Yield management does a better and better job of maximizing r and minimizing p, inflation is generally if anything increasing m, and the data scientists of the world are improving their estimates of p, m, and r. All of that means that even if the internal exchange rate c is constant, the visible effect is persistent devaluation of points/miles. It's going to be less and less likely to find absolute steals, so if that's what you were in the game for, well, the prognosis isn't good.

Not for all hotels. Marriott Bonvoy, for example, tends to price points stay according to points redemption demand, not related to cash prices. So far that reason, hotels in parts of the world where points are not used as often, such as Africa, Middle East, and parts of Asia, tend to need very low numbers of points even if the cash price is not so cheap, while hotels in some high-redemption-demand parts of the USA tend to require lots of points, even if the cash price is fairly low. So I've gotten hotels priced near $200 US at 15k points a night in the Middle East and 7500 points a night in South Africa, while seeing hotels that can go for just $80 a night some weeks of the year near Disneyland charge 45k a night (because of points redemption demand there the rest of the year).

That's not necessarily incompatible with my generalized model (note all the low point prices in the places you mention in Hilton Honors, which would seem like the closest hotel program to that model). Since labor is generally going to be the biggest contributor to m for a hotel, low labor costs (relative to North America/Europe) in those places will decrease m. If real estate is cheaper in those places (suspect so, relative to North America and Europe), then there's more reason to overbuild for the usual occupancy, which would tend to increase p, which largely decouples those from r.

Interesting you mention Asia: this coming spring, I'm going to blow through about a million HHonors points in Asia, because why not? They're not that useful in North America. 11 nights - Singapore-Koh Samui-Bangkok.

On one hand, the points aren't worth much anymore. It will be interesting to see whether I actually place a $850/nt "value" on Koh Samui, which is their cash asking price, but I guess I don't care because these points are like water. But on the other hand, I often earn 40-50 per dollar on spend, so it's just different math.

When I started in HHonors, it was 10 points per dollar and you needed 100,000 points for a week in Hawaii. Now 40-50/$, plus huge CC signup bonuses, and you need 380,000 for 5 nights at the top resorts. They've become Zimbabwe dollars, but I guess if you don't hoard for too long it's okay...

If your focus has been on aspirational awards, then yes, that game is dying.

Consider long-haul premium cabin air travel. For a long time, economy US-Europe was 60k round trip while Business was 100k. It cost 67% more miles to fly Business than Economy. That's almost never the case with cash tickets, with business class tickets usually costing 3x or more compared to economy. So even business travelers who flew a lot of cheap domestic coach tickets used to find such award tickets within reach as an occasional treat for a spouse/family vacation if they were flexible on dates and could land saver space.

That sort of thing is going away. The future of travel rewards is a fairly boring rebate %. Earn based on $ spent, and burn based on the cash price of the desired reward. In reality, when airlines get to this point, there is no reason to put spend on an airline card anymore. But people are irrational. Look at all the people that saved up 25k points and then are thrilled when they turn them in for a "free" ticket when that ticket would have only cost $200 cash to begin with.

Very interesting!

Would you be willing to elaborate on the equation? I don't quite understand how it is derived and what are the assumptions behind it.

Good point.
Just booked a flight yesterday. EWR-RGN, BKK-EWR. $1760 with AmEx Plat discount,plus 22K UA miles, plus 5x MRs...after all said and done, the total is around $1300. How can you beat that with miles? I didn't aspire to fly CA again, but as I only care about the hard product, it works for me.
The coach price on that itinerary is $399, for almost 40 hours of flying time. OTOH, I routinely pay close $1000 for coach NYC-Caribbean on the weekends I want, for 7 hrs. I have a feeling I'll be using a lot of these miles to redeem standard awards for these flights.

The basic assumption is that the true cost to a loyalty/reward program of a redemption is the difference in the provider's net cash profit/loss between the universe(s) where the redemption happens and the universe(s) where the redemption doesn't happen. Both of those are of course, impossible to know with certainty, so thinking in terms of probabilities is quite useful. If in the absence of the redemption, the flight/hotel would have sold out (or the relevant class of seats/rooms would have), the difference is basically what the last seat/room would have sold for. Otherwise, the cost of the redemption is arguably some likely-small premium over the marginal cost of the seat/room (in the airline case: fuel to move a person of typical weight the distance of the flight, the labor cost of whatever extra portion of labor is required (FA, cleaning), and the wholesale cost of whatever amenities were provided; in the hotel case, it's the small amount of electricity an occupied room draws over a vacant room, a housekeeper to clean the room, and things like wholesale cost of a complimentary breakfast).

In the formula provided, p is basically the probability that the latter case holds and (1 - p) is the probability that the former case holds (one can make things a lot more complex and maybe improve things by considering more than 2 possible outcomes). m is the marginal cost plus some small premium, and r is the price the last seat/room would fetch in cash. c is an internal valuation of a point; it's almost certainly more than what "providers" (the businesses of flying people in metal tubes or renting rooms by the night) "pay" the loyalty program for points, and a lot less than the cash purchase rate for points and less than what transfer partners effectively pay for points, and it's also greater than the value at which the points are carried as a liability on the balance sheet (if nothing else, because of points lost through account expirations, etc.). In Hilton's case, I'd spitball that the provider purchase rate is 0.1 cent per point (though this is insignificant compared to the other fees properties pay HLT), the internal valuation is something like 0.2 cents per point, and transfer partners like AmEx effectively buy points at 0.25 cents/point (considering that AmEx's swipe fees at airlines and restaurants are probably something like 2%, you can see how the Aspire is profitable for AmEx even if almost all of the annual fee goes to HLT to buy Diamond status).

In the airline case, of course, m is basically fun-bucks as are the notional purchases of points from flying. An airline has broad latitude to make the people-in-metal-tubes business look good at the expense of the reward/loyalty program or vice versa; to the extent that a hotel program's properties are owned by the program, the same latitude exists. The further-and-further the provider is from the program, the more I'd expect the program to be close to my formula: imagine Oneworld launching an alliance-wide FF program and it would probably somewhat resemble Hilton's by being largely revenue+segment (vs. distance) based for earn and dynamic for burn.

As noted, if cash prices are being adjusted by a yield management system to minimize p and manage to do so reasonably well, the rewards will basically become a straight percentage-of-spend (especially to the extent that points are awarded based largely on spend). However, if the cash price were constrained from falling to increase utilization, e.g. because discounting too much would ruin the image of flying first/business or staying in Bora Bora, then this formula suggests that the apparent redemption rate will look really appealing (and that there will be more award redemptions than cash purchases). Comparing typical redemption rates for a Ritzstoria resort to any number of Courtgardens provides some evidence here: it wouldn't really surprise me if a lot of Doubletrees in the US get more from HLT per award stay than the Conrad Koh Samui.

[MENTION=10062559]hhdl[/MENTION]: Thanks, though I still don't understand the formula

(p*m + (1 - p)*r))/c

If p is the probability that the room wouldn't sell regularly, then (1 - p) is the probability that the room sells "regularly" (= for cash).

In both cases, the hotel will have to pay the marginal cost of providing the room. So I don't understand why you have the m in the first term but not the second.

Furthermore, if the hotel lets somebody redeem an award, it gets a compensation from the chain. That should somehow factor into the first term. The compensation usually at least covers the marginal cost of providing the room.

Finally, there is the issue that it isn't in any way an accurate model of all scenarios. There are at least four outcomes:

1.) The room wouldn't sell regularly but the hotel can sell the room as an award.
2.) The room won't sell regularly and nobody redeems it as an award.
3.) The room sells regularly.
4.) The room would have sold but that didn't realize because somebody took out an award before it could be sold for cash.

In any case, I'm still totally lost with your equation. It cannot stem from a consumer's optimization problem, because the consumer doesn't factor in m. It cannot stem from the chain's optimization problem, because the chain doesn't get paid r (but a small percentage of it) and doesn't incur m. So it must be derived somehow from the hotel's optimization problem.

But what can the hotel choose? It's totally unclear to me. Can it choose award inventory (as with IHG)? Or is it assumed that every room is bookable as an award?

From my perspective, the hotel takes m as a paramter. It takes the compensation it receives in case a reward is redeemed as constant as well. If we assume the hotel can set award inventory, that would be a choice variable. If, instead, we assume the hotel must make every (standard) room available as an award, it wouldn't be a choice variable.

Then, the only choice variable would be r. In any case, it seems to me the probabilities should be endogenous variables that are a function of r.

Loyalty benefits for status members are shrinking but the awards game is hardly dying. As recently as 7-8 years ago virtually no US cards had big bonus categories. Then Chase came out swinging hard first with the CSP and then with the CSR to take down Amex, and the 2 have been at war since coming up with more and more bonus categories and ways to earn points to try and woo customers, and now with Citi and Capital One stepping into the game the competition between them is only going to get more fierce.

Have redemption cost in points gone way up, yes definitely, but so has the ability to rapidly earn points, in my opinion at an even faster rate.

As others have mentioned here the game is changing. Earning serious mileage through flying is really tough these days, and the days of mileage runs are pretty much over. Mileage programs now earn the airlines big bucks from the CC companies buying points at 1.2-2c each. This will put the brakes on them devaluing awards too much, and ESPECIALLY devaluing partner awards too much because then people will choose to transfer into a different programs and they'll miss out. The loyalty programs should really now be though of more as points programs, as the airlines see points less as a way to reward FF and more of a way to generate revenue through having Chase,Amex etc buy the points.

Yes, right now there are only the big 3 airlines in the US but their FF programs are also competing with all the transfer partners in the world.

The big losers here are the CC companies that are trying to do everything to woo consumers to misspend their points on BS giftcards and other really bad redemptions, but it seems they are failing at this since most people realize that the transfers present far more value.

How does this play out in the long run, i'm not sure, but there will always be partner award redemption sweet spots. Yes business class redemptions to south america are sometimes really cheap in cash, but they are sometimes really cheap in points too. You can fly from Mexico City all the way to Arequipa in the south of peru in avianca biz (a distnace of nearly 5000km) for only 25k united points or 20k avianca points.

ANA is probably the best Amex partner and is better used for redemptions to Asia such as 100k from USA to SE asia roundtrip. Those flights are nearly $5-7,000 in cash. OK maybe you see a 2x3x2 outdated biz with a mainland chinese carrier and 3 layovers for $1.7k RT on a brief flash-sale, but thats not apples to apples. Also, thats to say nothing of first class redemptions that no normal person can afford, i've been able to take 25+ hour first class flights on Cathay and Korean Air can cost 5 figures in cash and those awards are still relatively plentiful. I think the game is changing but its certainly not dead.

I havent paid for a flight or a hotel stay (other than Airbnb / Homeaway) since 2009 (ie, when I joined FT). Harder, maybe. Needs more planning, yes. Dying, absolutely not.

The days of 67,500 to Asia is over, but 180,000 is not hard to do,

It has been fun over the years

I find that incredible. Sure, this year was the first time I paid cash for international flights, because the rates were so absurdly low, miles wouldn't give much value.
But domestic awards values are usually horrible... and local flights abroad are often on non-alliance airlines.
And hotels...if you only stay in big cities with big chain hotel presence, I get that. But there are no chain hotels or AirBnB in the African bush, S.American rainforest, or SE Asian jungle.

We always planned 9-12 months ahead, and generally could find awards we were looking for (for 4 people, on same flight, during school holidays, always J or F). It required having 2M miles across different alliances at all times, for max flexibility. But I've never in my life spent as much on travel as now when I travel for free. Before, taking a 30 hr flight would give me pause ... in J or F, who cares how long the flight is if champagne is flowing... But even if the flight is free... top non-corporate lodges are not...

Reminds me how there used to be a bug with Delta's website that allowed you to self upgrade yourself to first or business in certain situations when there was a schedule change (the manifestation of the bug was that under those situations the rebooking engine would offer you the same flight that you were already on but in the front cabin). I used it probably a dozen times over the course of a couple of years before someone posted on FT about it and it was shut down the next time I had an opportunity.

I remember that bug fondly. Got lie-flat business on BRU-ATL when I was exhausted. It was such a nice surprise...

Si! Excelente! Good work senor! Especially on DL. Also can you remember ticketing TATL on BD plate, everyday OJ itins... with no YQ ever and we find lots of UA/LH flights LHR-SFO-BRU etc for ~200. LOL!

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.