Air Miles Are Hard To Redeem

It’s getting crappier and crappier to try to redeem airmiles. Everyone seems to advertise 25,000 miles will get you a roundtrip ticket in the US which is the old norm.  When Kim and I recently went to redeem miles to get her sister Angie a flight out here from either Harrisburg or Philadelphia, PA, we found it to be a huge pain in the arse.  First, weekends were non-existent.  Forget about it.

Then, there was only *1* Saver day in March/April for Harrisburg.  Saver is the term used to mean it only takes 12,500 miles for that portion of the trip.  The return flight would have to be a 25,000 Premium flight.  There were no options.  And the one date for the Saver didn’t work out to our schedule which actually had some flexibility in dates. 

At that point I started looking around for other flights and seeing what they cost.  Sure enough, you can’t get to Stockholm for the touted 50,000 miles……it’ll be 100,000.  Likewise, other locations in the US had huge limitations on where the Saver miles were available.

Then I had the idea of using a Star Alliance partner as they make no mention at all of Saver and Premium and it’s a purported 25,000 miles.  We called up the 800 number and while the 24th of March was open, there was no return flight within 4 days of the needed return date.  Bummer.

It reminded me of the book Catch 22, where the amount of sorties flown before heading home kept being raised whenever they were achieved.  In this case, Sabrina is finally up to the point of 50,000 miles and what we hoped would be a trip to Europe or South America with all of us.  But now, it turns out she’ll need another 5 years of flying to get to that level, if it even stays at that target.  I have a feeling it won’t.

Needless to say, our interest in one given air miles loyalty program over another is dead.  We don’t have loyalty for any given airline.  We’ll simply be looking for the cheapest flight and if we happen to get miles, cool.  Otherwise, we don’t plan on being able to use the miles much.  Especially with airlines like American and United dropping their inactivity limits down to 18 months (Kim and I have both lost many miles since the beginning of the year due to this rule coming along without much fanfare).  Unless you’re a business traveler, it just doesn’t make much sense any more.  50,000 miles is 10 roundtrip trips from Seattle to New York at a cost of around $6000 or more.  For us, now that I no longer have a work reason to head there, it’ll take about 10 years to accomplish that.  It doesn’t seem worth it in the long run to remain loyal to any given airline for that amount of time, only to have the goal raised when you get there.  I think Yossarian would agree.