No one likes seeing a devaluation and the latest one from Lifemiles has those in the hobby collectively groaning. But there are enough weird quirks that you might be able to undo the devaluation yourself.

Avianca Lifemiles has now devalued awards twice in a year

One Mile at a Time notes that Avianca Lifemiles–a loyalty program that often sells its miles at low rates–has devalued once again. The prior devaluation took place only six months prior, meaning this latest hit represents an especially significant loss in value in the past year. Where flights to Europe cost 63,000 a year ago, they now cost 80,000 one way to Europe. That very clearly moves Lifemiles away from having competitive award rates on the route, placing it just shy of United’s 88,000 miles on partner awards.

What’s a shame is how high the price has risen in just a short time, even as Lifemiles continues to aggressively sell points subscriptions. That’s a bit disingenuous on their part. What’s the point of subscribing when the goal posts move so much?

I’m seeing very nuanced results that get stranger the more I look

Let’s start this off with a recognition of the rates that now seem to be prevalent. Let’s say you want to fly from New York JFK to Frankfurt on Lufthansa on March 24, 2025. That flight will cost you 80,000 Lifemiles for the journey.

Now let’s look at a connecting flight from New York JFK to Amsterdam on that same date. Well, the price drops from 80,000 to 69,000 (the old rate before devaluation was 70,000). Fair enough, some programs have semi-dynamic pricing for connections vs. non-stops like Air France.

Of course if you instead take the option out of New York EWR instead of from JFK, you’ll see the higher pricing persist. The 80,000 miles required here is the same as the non-stop. In this case, I hope you leave out of JFK and not EWR.

Manually choosing your airline impacts rating?

Let’s take a look at something a bit weird that I didn’t know impacts the price of the award. At the top of the page when you search for your Lifemiles award flights, you’ll find the “Smart Search” feature selected by default.

Let’s see what the pricing is for Vancouver YVR to Amsterdam on March 25, 2025. Sure enough, we see a painful 90,000 Lifemiles required for the flight.

Now let’s manually change the airline to Lufthansa. Let’s repeat the same exact set of airports on the same day. And we now see the price has dropped to 63,000 Lifemiles for the journey? As you can see, it’s the same exact routing but now the price dropped to older levels.

So let’s go back to the original example I showed with the nonstop from New York JFK to Frankfurt. That original search was performed via Smart Search, so let me try manually selecting Lufthansa again. Sure enough, the price suddenly drops to 69,000 miles.

It’s not just Lufthansa with this odd pricing

Let’s try checking out flights on Swiss, like this option departing Toronto YYZ and arriving at Zurich ZRH on April 1, 2025. We find a price of 80,000 when using the Smart Search option.

Now let’s once again stop using Smart Search and instead manually select Swiss on the dropdown. The price then drops to 63,000.

But it doesn’t always work

Let’s try United from London LHR to New York EWR on May 13, 2025. Well, regardless of selecting Smart Search or United, the business class pricing sits at 80,000.

What to make of this?

What’s not clear to me is why Smart Search results give higher pricing than manually selecting your airline. It would seem strange that this is a feature of the website (unless of course you think “Smart Search” is a reference to how smart the programmers were in charging more for their awards). It doesn’t always work, which seems to suggest it wasn’t intentional.

Rather, this seems more like a programming error to me. Quite honestly, it doesn’t exactly surprise me that pricing errors exist on Lifemiles. I’ve long felt their site is buggy and full of surprises with certain airport pairings giving odd pricing. The weird pairing price is possibly why connecting routes out of JFK might get discounted.

For the Smart Search results, it’s not clear to me which pricing is supposed to persist. But if you had hopes of using up your Lifemiles at more reasonable rates, you now are on notice to use your miles and how to (temporarily?) bypass the second devaluation.

Happy hunting.