How we assigned a cash value to points and miles from 30 of the most popular loyalty programs (2024)

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• Knowing the cash value of points and miles can help you make better decisions when you redeem them.
• We've developed a set of valuations for airline, hotel, and bank loyalty programs to guide you.
• The value (in cents) per point or mile depends on factors including program policies.
• Read Business Insider's guide to the best travel rewards credit cards.

If you earn points and miles through credit cards, hotel stays, or flights, it helps to have a sense of what they're worth. This will help you get maximum value from your rewards — whether it's for a first-class flight or a hotel stay.

To that end, we've published a list of valuations for a variety of airline, hotel, and banking programs. Our valuations show the cash equivalent you can expect to get from your rewards when you use them to book travel. They can also help you decide which rewards to earn, and whether you should redeem them at your earliest convenience or save them for more lucrative opportunities.

Rather than settle on a single number (in cents per point or mile) for each valuation, we provide three to give you a better sense of when you should (and shouldn't) use your rewards:

• The highest number is aspirational; if you can redeem at that rate (or higher), then you're getting an exceptional deal
• The middle number represents a reasonable average; you can expect most awards to yield a return in the ballpark, and feel comfortable redeeming for that amount
• The low number represents a minimum, below which we don't recommend redeeming

To help you put our points and mile valuations to use, this article describes how we came up with them. Loyalty programs appear in all shapes and sizes, so there's no universal methodology for evaluating them, but these are the factors we considered to see how each one stacks up.

The value you can expect from your rewards

This is the nuts and bolts of any valuation: How much cash value can you get from points and miles when you actually redeem them? The question may sound simple, and calculating the rate of return is straightforward for most individual award redemptions,but the broader answer is complex for several reasons.

First, a single award redemption isn't necessarily representative of an entire loyalty program. For example, if you're looking to use American Airlines miles, the value you'll get depends on the specific flight you book.

If you conducted a search of every award fare on American, you might find some award flights netting a rate of return over 3 cents per mile and others netting under 1 cent per mile. That's a wide range, and it doesn't include less fruitful redemption options like merchandise or gift cards, which may yield less than 0.5 cents per mile. Each number is a drop on a canvas; only together do they paint a complete picture.

Second, prices change. Today, you might be able to book a $300 hotel room for 20,000 points, giving you a return of 1.5 cents per point. Tomorrow, the cash price of that same hotel room could drop to $250, lowering your return to 1.25 cents per point. Though neither provides a definitive value for those points, they can both help you decide whether you should redeem points or pay cash.

For example, let's say you want to book an Alaska Airlines flight.Normally, a paid ticket to the destination you want is $130, and the award price is 7,500 miles — resulting in a value of 1.7 cents per mile ($130 / 7,500 miles). However, if Alaska has a fare sale that drops the price of a ticket to $60, you'll get a value of just 0.8 cents per mile ($60 / 7,500 miles).

We value Alaska Airlines miles at 1.5 cents each, on average. In the first case (the $130 ticket), you're getting a higher than average value, so redeeming miles for the ticket is a good deal. In the second case, you're getting a much lower value — so you might consider holding onto your miles for a more expensive redemption and just paying cash.

To account for the variety of redemption options and fluctuating prices, we took a representative sample of award searches, and balanced that hard data with years of experience booking flights and hotel stays with dozens of airlines and hotel chains worldwide. This helped us distinguish outliers from typical results.

That analysis forms the basis for our valuations, which we then tweaked in consideration of the other factors listed below.

Your options for using rewards

Generally speaking, the more options you have to redeem rewards, the more likely they are to be useful — especially because, during the pandemic, a lot of us weren't traveling and looked for other ways to cash out points and miles.

Not all redemption options are equal, but even those that offer a lower cash value still add to the usefulness of a loyalty program, since it's better to get something than nothing. Our valuations reflect not only the types of redemption options offered by each program, but also whether or not they're a good deal.

More redemption options could mean a far-ranging route map for an airline (so you can reach more destinations), an expansive global footprint for a hotel chain, or partnerships with other travel providers (like airline alliances) that let you use your points and miles across a larger network. It could also mean alternative payment methods, such as cash and points awards, which let you offset some of the cash cost with points. Many programs also offer a variety of alternative redemption options, such as:

• Statement credits to reduce your credit card bill
• Gift cards to popular retailers
• Merchandise (for example, you can use points from various programs to pay at checkout with Amazon)
• Charity donations
• Experiences or exclusive events

Among experienced points travelers, one of the most highly prized options for using rewards is transferring them to other loyalty programs. We put a premium on transferable points like Chase Ultimate Rewards® and Amex Membership Rewards that offer access to a variety of airline and hotel transfer partners. Many hotel programs (and some airline programs) offer transfers as well, but typically at less favorable rates. That warrants less of a bump in our valuations, but having the option to transfer is better than not.

Award availability

Some loyalty programs talk a big game by advertising attractive award rates and access to premium travel experiences, but the best award rates in the world mean little if you can't actually book a flight or hotel stay with your points.

Programs that tend to have abundant award availability, such as Southwest and JetBlue, get a boost in our valuations, while those with poor availability are marked down accordingly.

Loyalty programs generally limit award availability in one of three ways:

• Capping the amount of award space released at any given time
• Raising prices during times of peak demand, such that award space exists only at exorbitant rates
• Playing games with how rates are categorized to make award inventory scarcer than it should be

All of these strategies diminish the value of points and miles.

Ease of use

Even programs with excellent award availability can fall flat if booking is a hassle, and by design or not, many loyalty programs put up significant barriers to redemption.

One common barrier is a poorly designed award search engine that returns unreliable or incomplete results. For example, some airlines don't show complete availability for award flights on partner airlines online. This complicates the booking process for anyone looking to use miles to fly on another airline; you may have to call the airline to book some partner awards by phone.

Another common barrier is award booking fees, such as the flat fee Air Canada Aeroplan tacks on to partner awards or the close-in booking fee Spirit Airlines charges for awards booked within 28 days of departure.

Then there are the seemingly arbitrary rules about when you can and can't book an award — for example, Choice Privileges hotel loyalty program limits award bookings to 100 days from your checkout date. We've factored such costs and impediments to award redemptions into our valuations.

Expiration policies

Loyalty programs impose a wide range of expiration policies for their points and miles. Some programs (like Delta SkyMiles and JetBlue TrueBlue) offer rewards that never expire. More commonly, points and miles expire when your account is inactive for a set period ranging from months to years. In those cases, qualifying activity in your account can reset the clock, but a handful of programs (like Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer and Wyndham Rewards) impose a strict expiration timeline regardless of subsequent activity.

Rewards that expire with less than one year of inactivity get a substantial downgrade in these valuations, as points and miles are clearly worth less when you have to jump through hoops to maintain them.

Programs with expiration policies in the range of 12-24 months get a lesser downgrade, along with programs that don't allow a reset with qualifying activity (regardless of the duration). Expiration policies longer than 24 months are treated neutrally, while programs with no expiration policy are upgraded modestly.

Options for sharing and pooling rewards

Many loyalty programs allow you to share or pool rewards with other members, making it easier to accrue points or miles in large quantities. The most valuable policies allow you to transfer rewards to another member at no charge, with minimal restrictions on how much and with whom you can share them.

Programs with flexible sharing and pooling options get a small bump in these valuations, while programs that charge a fee, impose prohibitive limits, or simply don't allow sharing at all take a small hit.

Options for earning rewards

Many rewards can't be redeemed until you hit a certain threshold, like the cost of a one-way flight or a free night at a hotel in the lowest award category. Programs that make accumulating rewards easy (relative to redemption costs) get a bump in these valuations.

You can accumulate rewards in a variety of ways, including qualifying travel activities like flights and hotel stays, doing business with partners such as shopping portals or dining programs, and spending on a co-branded credit card. You can also accumulate rewards by transferring points from elsewhere, so programs with viable inbound transfer options get a bump here as well.

Miscellaneous factors

• Devaluation history — Loyalty programs inevitably change, sometimes for the better, more often for the worse. But as Ella Fitzgerald says, it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it. Programs that make modest changes occasionally and with ample warning get a pass, but we're wary of programs that make wholesale negative changes, (like when Alaska increased the price of Emirates first-class awards by up to 100%) with no notice.
• Sweet spots and idiosyncrasies — Many programs have policies that can be highly valuable in limited circ*mstances, such as Amex Membership Rewards transfer bonuses, Alaska Airlines' stopover policy, Air Canada's low fee for lap infant awards, and waived resort fees on award stays by Hyatt and Hilton. We account for such policies on a case-by-case basis.
• Associated credit card perks — Many programs offer co-branded credit cards with benefits that can increase the value of your points or miles, such as rebates on JetBlue awards or a fourth award night free from IHG. While such benefits may only be available to cardholders, we factor them into these valuations.

Our caveat

We stand behind these valuations, but they aren't set in stone. The value of points and miles depends a lot on your circ*mstances; for example, Southwest Rapid Rewards points are bound to be less useful to someone living in Burlington, Vermont or Butte, Montana (cities that aren't served by Southwest) than to someone living in Denver or Nashville (which have lots of Southwest flights).

With few exceptions, there's plenty of room for disagreement over how much points or miles are worth. We recommend you use these valuations as a point of reference, and then tweak them as you see fit to suit your needs.