[ DISCOVERY · THE DISPATCH ]

Loyalty Points Are a Trap and I Did the Math So You Don't Have To

Are airline loyalty points worth it in 2026? I added up four years of hoarding miles, the devaluations, the expiry, the saver seats that never exist — and the honest answer made me cancel a card. Here's the math.

Are airline loyalty points worth it? After four years of treating my mileage balance like a savings account, I sat down with a calculator and the answer was so bleak I cancelled a credit card the same afternoon.

I want to be careful here, because the points world is full of people who genuinely win big — the folks who fly someone’s first-class suite to Tokyo on 80,000 miles and a $5 fee. Those people exist. I’ve met them. But they are not most of us, and they spend hours a week on this stuff like it’s a part-time job. For the normal traveler who just dutifully hoards, the math is grim, and nobody selling you a co-branded card wants you to run it.

So I ran it.

Strip away the marketing and a frequent-flyer mile is worth, on average, somewhere around 1 to 1.5 cents when you redeem it. Sometimes more if you nail a sweet-spot business-class redemption. Often less — I’ve seen redemptions value out at well under a cent, which is insulting, that’s worse than a cashback card.

Here’s the four-year tally that broke me. I’d accumulated roughly 140,000 miles across a couple of programs. Felt rich. Then I tried to actually use them and the “saver” award seats — the cheap ones, the whole point — were a ghost town on every date I wanted. The available seats wanted nearly double the miles. At that real-world rate, my glorious 140k hoard was worth maybe $1,200-$1,400 in flights I’d actually take. Over four years of steering spending toward earning them. I could’ve put that same spending on a flat 2% cashback card and had cold, flexible cash worth more, that never expires, that books any seat on any airline with no blackout dates.

That comparison is the whole ballgame. And the points lost.

This is the part that genuinely made me angry. Airline miles are a currency the airline can devalue whenever it likes, with little or no notice, and it does. They quietly raise the number of miles a flight costs. Your balance doesn’t change — the price changes underneath you. It’s inflation you have no vote on.

I had a specific reward flight in my sights, watched it for months, and one morning it had jumped by something like 30% in miles. Same flight. Same plane. They just decided my miles were worth less. Imagine a bank doing that to your dollars overnight. You’d riot. But because it’s “points,” it feels like a game, and we let them.

So hoarding isn’t saving. Hoarding is holding a currency that’s designed to lose value the longer you hold it. Every mile sitting in your account is quietly worth less each year. The smart move and the marketing’s preferred move are exact opposites.

I’m not saying torch your accounts. There are cases where it works:

Flexible, cash-equivalent points — the kind from a bank’s own program that you can transfer to multiple airlines or just cash out near 1 cent each — are genuinely useful, because you’re not locked into one airline’s devaluation roulette. Optionality has value.

A big sign-up bonus is real money if you’d hit the spend anyway and you pay the card off in full. That’s not loyalty, though — that’s a bounty. Grab it, use it, move on. The trap is the loyalty part, the bit where you keep funneling spend to one program for years afterward.

And the rare big-cabin redemption, if you have the time to hunt saver seats, can hit 3-5 cents a point. That’s the dream people chase. Just be honest about whether you’re actually that person or whether you just like the idea of being that person. I liked the idea. I was not that person.

I switched my default spending to a simple flexible-points card I can cash out, plus a flat cashback card for everything else. I no longer steer trips toward “earning” anything. I book the best flight for the price, full stop. And the strange thing is travel got cheaper and easier the second I stopped optimizing for a currency the airline controls. No more weird routings to keep status. No more “I’ll fly the worse flight to earn the miles.” Just — the good flight. Paid for. Done.

Status is the same trap one floor up, by the way. If you’re paying for flights you don’t need just to requalify, the airline has turned you into its product. Let it go.

The points game isn’t a scam exactly. It’s worse — it’s a game tilted so the house wins on average, that’s marketed as a perk you’re winning. Do the math on your own balance. I bet it stings.

Earn fast, burn faster, and never, ever fall in love with a currency someone else can devalue while you sleep.

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