stevento

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.

pinniped

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.

Schutzee

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.

pinniped

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.

stevento

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.

sdsearch

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.)

RustyC

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.

mia

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

yuel

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

izzik

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.

ReinaDeLaSelva

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

pgary

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

speed.skater

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

pgary

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.

hhdl

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.