Tanic

I'm about to find out if all those Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes GCs that were a great deal last Dec are worth anything in BK Court.

ankitgu

Thank you - I'll keep that risk in mind. I will hopefully use them quickly to minimize any of those risks.

PS: If your username is based on the car... excellent choice. I still want one someday.

pinniped

Ordinarily, I agree with the general sentiment that you don't want millions of airline points/miles sitting around waiting for the next devaluation. But I don't expect WN to completely gut the program to the point where a 2021 flight would be less value than some suboptimal redemption (gift card, etc.) would be today.

I worry more about hotel points. I'm sitting on 1.3 million Hilton points. Hope to burn most of them in Asia in 2021.

ankitgu

I agree with you regarding Southwest. They've managed the point values better than most and I should be least worried about them.

I figure the loss is about 33% if I compare a gift card redemption (1.0 cents per mile) versus flight redemption (1.5 cents per mile). I doubt I will be on a plane in the next 1-2 years and so I see it as a modest loss in value to convert it to usable gift cards. The visible benefit is I reduce my actual cash usage (offset with gift cards), but the offsetting wildcard is what will the points actually be worth in a few years when I catch a flight. I don't have a forecast on that and don't know if Southwest might have its hand forced someday, because of the COVID situation.

This is a small amount in the grand scheme of things so I'll likely just redeem these over the coming months/year and call it a day. I wouldn't have let myself accrue such a large balance with other airlines because of the devaluation schemes, which is how I ended up with more at Southwest than I'd like. (I have intentionally not said the balance amount)

Hotels could be fairly usable for domestic travel in my opinion. I expect most of my travel in the next few years will be on road trips and plan to transfer points from my American Express cards to Hilton (1:2 conversion ratio) just before booking needs to reduce that devaluation risk. Will you fly to Asia to use your Hilton points?

pinniped

My plan for Asia is to redeem AS to fly CX. I will book in a few weeks for June/July 2021 travel. Alaska is offering free cancel/redeposit on anything booked prior to September 8th, so on the very remote chance that our destinations (BKK and SIN, likely) aren't open to U.S. passports, then we'll just bag it and redeposit everything. Hilton awards can be canceled up to a couple days before travel so no risk there either. The only catch is that if we still can't travel next summer, then the current AS->CX award levels will get replaced by Oneworld levels and it'll cost a lot more miles in the future.

My WN travel will gradually come back over the next few months. I'm not sitting on a big balance to begin with because I usually redeem my points whenever my wife or daughters need to travel. They never come close to A-list so I figure might as well use points for them.

darthbimmer

I didn't say they are. Redeeming RR points for award flights yields the best value for points, generally speaking. In certain edge cases, though, SW GCs become a worthwhile choice. Flights bought with GCs are revenue flights and earn points (RDPs, TQPs, and CPQPs). It's a useful trick when trying to get "over the line" on status qualification.