Who Can You Trust to Determine What Points Are Worth? Does It Even Matter?

1.9K

When it comes to determining what points are worth, I’m reminded of the phrase about opinions (I won’t quote the whole phrase because we try to remain family friend here. But it ends with, “…everybody has one”). Everyone has their way of putting a dollar (or cent) value on a point currency. Asking if the valuation is based on a self-serving desire to make a sign-up bonus look more valuable and, therefore, encourage more people to sign up with your referral link is a fair question.

I did an incognito search with DuckDuckGo (a search engine that doesn’t store information and therefore doesn’t skew search results to what it thinks you want to see) and found many popular websites giving their point valuations.

If you don’t trust any of the sites promoting credit card sign-ups in their search results, I understand. I spent years researching websites to determine if a Membership Reward was worth more than an Ultimate Reward point.

For other resources, several of our fellow BoardingArea websites publish regular updates to point valuations:

• One Mile at a Time
• Frequent Miler

Constantly keeping up with each program is a lot of work, and I appreciate the sites that try to account for all of the changes every month.

How Do I Value Points?

We’re not going to do that at YMMV. Mostly because I don’t have the time but also because I feel everyone has a different view of what a point is worth.

For example, most sites value an IHG One Rewards point at 0.5 cents. While I’ll redeem points at that value, since that’s what I can purchase them for during a sale, I got 1 CPP (cent per point) value for our stay at a Kimpton in Key West. If we stayed for 4 days, the value would have been even higher due to the fourth-night free benefit from the IHG Preferred co-brand credit card. Does that mean IHG points are worth 1 cent each, as I could easily make that argument? Not really, unless you can find a way to use the points as I did, staying at an expensive hotel room for a reasonable amount of points.

Transferrable Points

The same goes for transferable points. How can you value something that can be used in many different ways? For example, you can redeem Chase Ultimate Rewards with the Pay Yourself Back program, which is how I told my dad to cash out his points for 1.5 cents each. On the other hand, I transferred 75,000 Chase points to World of Hyatt and used them to book a club room with an ocean view at the Grand Hyatt Kauai, getting a value of 3 CPP.

Does that mean that Ultimate Rewards are worth 1.5 cents each or 3 cents each? It depends on whether you ask me or my dad.

I’m finding the debate about what a Bilt Rewards point is worth fascinating. Since the Bilt program has had an above-average number of changes since its launch, valuations are all over the place.

Bilt Rewards has a collection of valuable transfer partners, including Alaska Airlines, United MileagePlus, Aeroplan and World of Hyatt, so a point could be worth whatever you value in any of those programs.

I’d say a value of 3 CPP is reasonable because I can transfer points to Hyatt. However, Bilt Rewards also has a travel portal to redeem points for 1.25 CPP to pay for flights, rental cars and even Disney hotels and tickets. Many people will choose to use points this way. In addition, Bilt has just added the ability to use points to purchase items from Amazon.com.

I can say the same for Capital One. I received 100,000 points as a sign-up bonus for the Venture X, which I transferred to Singapore Airlines to book a business class seat that would have cost almost $4,000. Could I say those points are worth 4 CPP, and the sign-up bonus was $4,000? Maybe. Would I be honest if I considered if others could get the same value as I did? Maybe not.

When looking at any point currency, whether tied to a single program or transferable to several programs, you need to consider how you will use those points. You could always listen to websites telling you points are worth X or Y, but if you’re never going to use them that way, what are they really worth?

Thank you for listening to my TED talk 🙂

Want to comment on this post? Great! Read this first to help ensure it gets approved.

Want to sponsor a post, write something for Your Mileage May Vary, or put ads on our site? Click here for more info.

Like this post? Please share it! We have plenty more just like it and would love it if you decided to hang around and sign up to get emailed notifications of when we post.

Whether you’ve read our articles before or this is the first time you’re stopping by, we’re really glad you’re here and hope you come back to visit again!

This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary