At this point, it feels like a natural but necessary question that needs an answer: are points and miles getting worse?

Go back 10 years and points were easier to redeem

We’re not even talking about the “glory days” of award travel, but things sure felt easier 10 years ago:

• Award prices still were reasonably low, with generous routing rules that enabled you to add segments for free or travel around the world.
• First class awards were available. While airlines still wanted to protect the integrity of the cabin, they weren’t opposed to making seats available on the cheap.
• Foreign programs offered plenty of niche opportunities, especially with the partners you wanted to fly on. Partner award availability hadn’t yet dried up.
• Mistake pricing was still prevalent, and seemingly honored with some regularity.
• Hotel pricing still mostly was based on award categories, adding stability and predictability.
• Some mergers and acquisitions didn’t happen yet, keeping more competitors in the game.

This isn’t the whole list, but you get an idea of just how different the world 10 years ago was. Perhaps this was before you really got into the hobby yourself. Or perhaps you have been in it for decades and really remember how things were, perhaps even lamenting 10 years ago that things weren’t good.

Yes, the points world has changed. Did you expect it to stay stagnant forever?

But are points and award travel getting worse?

It’s simple enough to generalize it and leave it here, but it’s important to identify the exact pressures of what’s getting us all down.

These days, finding award space requires patience or a subscription, or both

Do you know what feels like the most impactful thing to any award program? Being unable to use your hard-earned points and miles. Accumulating miles and being unable to use them will leave you feeling like you completely wasted your time. It doesn’t matter how much they’ve devalued since you first started accumulating them. If you cannot use them at all once you’re ready to use them, it will feel like a bait-and-switch.

And guess what? With so many people out there looking to redeem because the earn rate of miles has gone up, there are more people fighting for the same awards.

In truth, not everyone is fighting over the same award space. Popular routes like the Continental U.S. to Europe, Hawaii, and Japan are what everyone wants to book. Nobody wants routings like intra-Europe (just take the train!) and many flights in other parts of the world that don’t touch the U.S.

What you’re finding as more people get miles is that there are more people like you booking the awards you want. So, you’ll either need more flexibility or you’ll need to pay for a service to give you award alerts. You need a leg up over other people looking to book flights and hotels.

Partner award availability isn’t really a thing these days

Sure, some airlines still make awards available to partners, but by and large, many programs save the most availability for their own members. That has the extra effect of feeling like you can’t do anything with your miles. It’s because partners just are being stingy.

There are several reasons why this happens, but we like the theory of the growth of bank programs. If airlines can earn money off the points from the banks that are transferred into their programs, why bother making the seats available to partners? Partner programs do compensate the airline for award bookings, but they’re at deeply discounted rates. The airline might be making more money directly from transfers in from bank programs and thus has a financial incentive to get members to load up on their miles.

So, yes, while bank programs like Bilt or Rove offer you protection from devaluation, they’ve also negatively impacted your ability to book partner awards.

Airlines are seemingly more content selling upgrades to members at a low fee than giving a good deal on award flights

Continuing on with the award availability aspect, consider that some airlines will seemingly do anything to make a quick buck. They’ll even sell a casual person a cheap upgrade to business class. At the same time, they won’t offer up that seat as an award price for anything near a reasonable price.

This is absolutely deflating. Why bother pursuing points and miles if they’re going to give the seat away to the lowest bidder? You’d think the airline would understand this has long-term repercussions with the viability of the loyalty program. Can the airline explain why this happens in terms that everyone will understand and accept? The weird thing is that it keeps happening even to this day, sometimes on long-haul flights too.

In fact, you seem better off booking an award ticket in economy as a back-up, and refreshing the price of an upgrade daily. If the upgrade shows up at a cheap price, take it. If not, cancel it for free. In the meantime, keep looking around with other award programs. Never stop trying to improve. At least if they have this illogical pricing in place, you might as well turn the tables on them and take advantage of it.

Devaluations have taken a lot of air out

Step past the award availability issue and you’ll get to the other pressing problem with award pricing: devaluations. There have been so many devaluations in the past couple of years. And yet, it doesn’t feel like programs are close to finished with this, does it?

Sure, there’s a science behind why programs devalue. It seems inevitable given how many points programs keep minting. More points means more people looking to purchase from the same supply of awards, which in turn means either there is shortage or the cost goes up. Which is better for you? Not using your points because there is no availability or not using your points because it costs too much?

And so programs have devalued. Each time, the goalposts move and it gets harder to accrue for that award you’ve been saving up for. At the same time, higher sign-up bonuses are pumped into credit cards to drive more engagement. Wouldn’t it be nice if the sign-up bonuses didn’t soar to new heights and you could instead get more reasonable devaluations? It doesn’t work that way, of course.

At a certain point, a program devalues too much and engagement dissipates. How can you stay motivated when a program like Hilton Honors looks completely unrecognizable over a span of two years? Not everything is that bad, but devaluations are never welcome news regardless of the degree.

Revenue-based redemption (and a lower value for points) appears here to stay

Along those same lines, it seems like some programs (particularly hotels, but airlines too) are pricing awards as though they’re linked to cash prices. Staying at a hotel over an expensive holiday? That’ll cost you on the points side as well. Flying on a Wednesday in the middle of the day to save points and miles over a Friday afternoon? We’ve been there, too.

As loyalty programs move away from fixed, predictable award pricing, it also removes the ability to get outsized value for your points. Some like to fixate on how they got 10 cents per point on a redemption where they spent 40,000 points to get $4,000 in value. Well, those declarations were far more prominent 10 years ago than they are today. That’s because those special events driving up the cash price now also drive up the points price. It might still be possible to get a deal, but maybe it’s closer to 2 cents per point instead of 10.

Could it mean more stability for the award program and possibly minimize the need to devalue? Maybe, but it hasn’t stopped Southwest from devaluing its points scheme and those have a mostly fixed cash value. But at the same time, moving to this metric is lazy for a program and doesn’t drive engagement. Loyalty programs should highlight the rare excellent use of points, not hide from it.

Credit card “couponification” just isn’t fun

As if award travel wasn’t enough, it seems all the banks felt the need to devalue their own bank programs. They can’t do it in the traditional sense, though Chase might say otherwise, but they can do it by making their credit cards annoying. They’re in the market to make money, after all, and that means loading up their cards with sometimes-useless credits.

Take the Chase Sapphire Reserve, a card we’ve talked about before. Some of the credits make sense and others are incredibly annoying. Are you going to remember that you have a Lyft credit that expires monthly? Are you going to mind that you have a StubHub credit to use at events where it’s more expensive and difficult to go through StubHub than to purchase directly from the vendor?

Or, how about the American Express Platinum and its myriad selection of benefits? Sure, you get a digital entertainment credit, but only at certain vendors. Or an Oura Ring credit that only applies to the purchase of the device and not the mandatory subscription fee. What about the airline incidental credit that’s becoming harder to use after unintended ways to use it got patched?

No one wants to deal with these expensive coupon books. Premium credit cards can say they’re taking that into consideration as they craft a delicate balance between benefit and annual fee. But then they still do it! And if you want their points to transfer to airlines and hotels, you’re going to need to suffer through these coupon books. They know you’re trapped and don’t care about anything but how much you can give them.

This is just a devaluation by a different name.

Elite status just doesn’t have the same feel to it anymore

As if all of that above wasn’t enough, there’s the elite status aspect. You know by now that there are two aspects of every loyalty program: the points you earn and the benefits you get for being loyal. It wouldn’t be right to just have the lowering benefits apply on just the earn and burn side.

Elite status is in some cases is handed out like candy (Hilton and to a lesser extent Marriott). Others will freely hand it out as long as you give them sweet credit card spend (practically all other programs).

As more people join the elite ranks, upgrades become harder to honor–there are only so many seats available on a plane or rooms in a hotel. Value in the program diminishes for each additional elite member the program adds. And that leads to lower expectations, especially when comparing where things were at 10 years ago. Some might give it up and become a free agent while others are stuck. Regardless, being an elite these days carries less weight than it once did before.

And yet, things will continue to change

It’s hard to put an exact trajectory on where the points and miles hobby will be in the next 10 years because of how much it has changed in the past 10.

There are many issues facing your ability to earn and redeem points in the years to come, including:

• The use of “big data” or AI tools. As loyalty programs understand more of their own data and how to extract as much money as possible from customers, so too does award pricing and availability. It’s my belief this is how we got into much of this mess in the first place.
  
• For some programs, it’s a matter of following the leader. Both American and United have had a history of copying Delta’s moves, including the miserable award rates found on many of their own flights. Some, like Alaska or Hyatt, have attempted to buck the trends but still follow the leaders. They eventually hit a point of realizing they don’t need to be that good to draw interest.
  
• Potential legislation capping credit card rewards. There is a belief floating around that rich people are the ones benefitting the most from credit card rewards and are driving the cost of interest higher. Thus, proposals come up that then cap what you can earn. It’s a false assertion that it’s the rich benefitting at the expense of the poor, but nonetheless, it’s a nonzero risk that something passes that impacts your ability to earn. If and when that happens, expect massive changes to loyalty schemes. You might even see award sales again.
  
• It’s the economy, stupid. Yes, the famous quote from James Carville can apply to your points stash. With any recession or economic downturn, there can be a resetting of expectations with award prices. Or, it can mean you’re out of a job and unable to earn points. That can lead to downward pressure on demand or an increase in supply, and boost your outlook in the immediate future, assuming you still can afford to go. At the same time, if the economy continues to soar to new heights, you might see more devaluations heading your way.
  
• Consolidation isn’t your friend. From an award program perspective, generally speaking you do not want consolidation. It removes a competitor in an already-limited field. But what if Hyatt were to take over IHG (something that we wouldn’t expect to happen but let’s go with the scenario)? You might think it would be good that Hyatt, with a loyalty program that has good benefits, would ultimately be better than what it replaces. However, that’s failing to recognize that Hyatt’s value is precisely because they’re a smaller entity. Once they get to comparable size to their competitors, they have no competitive reason to be that good with benefits. Thus, we still assert you do not want consolidation.
  
• The loss of low cost carriers is bad for your wallet. Now for the contradictory statement: consolidation might be helpful but for the low cost suppliers that are challenging the incumbents. You need low cost carriers to exist because they’re the ones keeping the pressure on the full-service airlines. When Spirit goes out of business and Frontier doesn’t pick up the pieces, it makes it that much harder for Frontier (or others) to continue to challenge the full-service airlines. You might not have ever wanted Spirit’s or Frontier’s miles, but you want them to survive to keep things low-priced. And a low cash price tends to mean a low award price.

While things are worse than before, it doesn’t mean there are no deals

Yes, the points and miles hobby is past its glory days. And, we’re not expecting things to improve in the near-term. But that doesn’t mean that all is lost. There still are plenty of ways to engage and still get outsized value.

For example, Rove Miles is one of the bright spots as it continues to pick up steam and innovate as a bank program. Or Bilt, for all the warts it showed with the botched 2.0 rollout, still offers a competitive product to go against the bigger banks.

And maybe it’s time to focus less on Hyatt and more on smaller chains like I Prefer or Leading Hotels of the World? Or, if you want a bigger chain, then perhaps consider Accor?

In the short term, airlines like JAL have been some of the hottest programs as people find out how to maximize the transfer partners. SAS is another program that people are giving a refreshed look at since its big 1 million point giveaway to introduce itself to SkyTeam. Even Miles & More continues to offer decent value once you get past the hefty fuel surcharges tacked onto the awards.

Value exists, so don’t use the broader trends as evidence that there are no deals. You need to adapt to the current trends to survive, not what was popular 10 years ago.