Are Air Miles Actually Worth The Hassle?

It's no secret: flights are getting more and more expensive. Being able to book your tickets with airline miles and not see your bank balance go down feels great — but is it actually worth the effort to earn and spend air miles? The answer depends on how often you travel, if you're very loyal to a particular airline, and what you're doing to earn miles. In general, though, miles aren't usually worth the effort.

You do earn miles for booking flights on your chosen airline, which sounds like a big benefit for frequent fliers, but the fastest way to earn points is usually by signing up for an airline credit card and using it for regular purchases. Some of those credit cards also have an annual fee and all charge interest on purchases, so you might end up spending more than you save. If you don't want a new credit card, you're probably not going to earn enough points to pay for an entire flight very quickly. If you're getting miles for free while making purchases you would already be making, that makes it more worthwhile. But considering that you have to do math to figure out their redemption value, you can have your flight options massively cut down by restricting yourself to just one airline and its partners, and you may feel pressured to book flights before your miles go down in value or expire, they're generally not the best way of planning for travel.

To earn a significant amount of miles from travel alone, you would have to fly all the time and then travel again to use the miles before they expire. Many airline credit cards offer significant signup bonuses, handing out tens of thousands of free points to new users — but how much each point is worth varies by airline. While the value of miles has gone up in general, most miles are only worth between 1 and 1.6 cents each. That means that a truly stellar intro offer of 80,000 miles really only translates to about $800 — barely enough to buy a single peak season flight from NYC to Rome.

While using some miles to bring down the price of a ticket might seem like a good way to save money while booking flights, it usually doesn't work like that. Annoyingly, if you don't have enough miles to cover a flight, you can't always pay the difference in cash. If you're trying to save money on last-minute flights, that may force you to buy the extra miles for far more than they're actually worth.