Travel points are not an asset - they’re a liability
Why holding onto miles too long quietly works against you
For years, I treated travel points the way most people treat savings accounts.1 Points are something to accumulate, protect, and spend wisely. Something I felt vaguely proud of watching grow.
And yet, recently, while looking at a redemption I’d missed out on, the thought landed almost uncomfortably clearly: these points aren’t an asset at all. They’re a liability.
The illusion of value
Points feel valuable because they’re framed that way. Loyalty programs encourage hoarding, dashboards celebrate growing balances, and entire corners of the internet obsess over extracting “maximum value.” The language sounds financial, disciplined, even responsible.
But unlike money, points don’t sit still. They don’t earn interest. They don’t appreciate. They don’t become more flexible with time. In fact, the opposite happens: programs change charts, add dynamic pricing, restrict partners, and reframe what “good value” means, all without asking your permission. It’s like inflation, but worse.
What may have looked like a great program to sign up for a few years ago often becomes an average one later, and eventually maybe even a frustrating one when you can’t spend the points you’ve worked so hard to earn.2
Aeroplan: death by a thousand tweaks
Aeroplan is a good example of this slow erosion of value. In theory, the program still advertises sweet spots and partner awards, and technically those still exist. In practice, many routes now price dynamically3, fixed points availability is increasingly limited, and the number of miles required for the same flights has crept up over time.
This change didn’t happen overnight. No single announcement screamed “devaluation.” Instead, over the last years we’ve seen a series of small changes: more miles here, fewer seats there, less predictability overall.
If you’re holding a large Aeroplan balance, this will impact you more. The longer you wait for that perfect redemption ticket to your dream destination, the more likely the goalposts quietly move again.
WestJet: from dollars to points, and why that matters
WestJet’s recent shift is even more revealing. For years, WestJet Rewards functioned as a dollar bank. If you had $500 in WestJet dollars, that meant $500 off a flight. Simple, and transparent.4 Maybe not exciting as there’s no fixed redemption distances to score a deal, but at least the unit of value was anchored to something real.
Recently, those dollars have been converted into points. In theory, this makes the program more flexible. In reality, it makes it far easier to devalue. Once rewards are abstracted into points, there’s no longer a clear one-to-one relationship with cash. The conversion rate can change, redemption values can fluctuate, and “from” pricing can quietly drift upward.5
Again, even though the “dollars to points” conversion is a bigger change than the Aeroplan “tweaks”, they’ve done nothing illegal or shocking. This is just another reminder that loyalty currencies are designed to benefit the issuer first.
The quiet cost of waiting
The real value of points isn’t obvious until you’re trying to use them. But even then, it shows up as hesitation. You’re second-guessing yourself: should I use these points now, or save them for something bigger and better? Or even worse, should I use them on a destination simply because it’s available, even though maybe I really wanted to go somewhere else.
Slowly we’re starting to build trips around redemptions instead of experiences. We’re passing on something perfectly good today because maybe something better might appear later.
That’s when points start behaving like a liability. They create friction. They introduce mental accounting. They turn travel planning into a game of optimization rather than intention.
I’ve caught myself doing this more than once: refreshing award calendars, doing math that only exists to justify not pulling the trigger. That’s not the experience of freedom I want to experience, let alone advocate for my students and readers.
Devaluation is a slow but steady burn
One of the biggest mistakes we make is thinking devaluations are something sudden, dramatic, and rare. In reality, they’re slow, incremental, and almost boring.
The intention is to fly under the radar, so you don’t notice it. A few extra points here. Fewer partner seats there. “Improved flexibility” that quietly costs more. Over time, the purchasing power of your rewards erodes, not because you did something wrong, but because the rules are designed that way.
The larger your balance with any single program, the larger your liability to the quiet erosion and devaluation of your points.
The antidote? Earning and spending points, maybe imperfectly but always intentionally, always beats waiting indefinitely for an ideal scenario that may never arrive.
Spending points is not failure
There’s a subtle shame attached to “bad” redemptions in the travel hacking world, as if anything below a certain cents-per-point threshold is somehow irresponsible.
I never bought into that shame-culture.
If using points removes stress, simplifies a trip, shortens a connection, or lets you say yes instead of maybe later, that’s value, even if some spreadsheet formula disagrees.
The reason I wrote my travel book was never to teach people how to die with the highest mileage balance. The goal was to travel better, easier, and with fewer constraints. Points that sit unused in an account, accumulating zero interest, don’t help you do that.
Get Into Action: Reframing the game
Once I stopped seeing points as a store of value and started seeing them as a perishable tool, the decisions became simpler. Good enough, now, is often better than perfect, someday.
Points are there to be spent. Preferably sooner rather than later, but definitly before they quietly lose the power you imagined they had. That doesn’t mean being reckless. It just means being honest about what you’re actually holding, and where you’d like to go next.
If you’ve been sitting on a large points balance, consider what it’s really costing you. Look at one upcoming trip and ask a simple question: would using points here make this easier or more enjoyable right now? If the answer is yes, that’s probably reason enough. If you want to explore this mindset further, it’s something I dig into often in my writing and courses, not as a strategy for “winning” travel, but as a way to make travel feel lighter again.
Further reading
I’m not against spending money. Skipping your daily double latte at Starbucks is not necessarily smart financial management. Those few dollars a day definitely will help you over time, but the right money mindset will help you get there even faster. I have an online course on the topic - free preview here.
I’m looking at you, AirMiles. In all seriousness, in my travel hacking program, one of the exercises is to make a list of all the programs you have points in, and then select one or two to focus on, for a specific travel purpose. For me (and most of my students), AirMiles doesn’t fit the bill - but I was able to redeem my miles for some nice BBQ plates instead.
Dynamic pricing means you can book “any” seat, but at increased market value, instead of using fixed redemption schedules that are distance based. The added available seats sound great, but come at a cost of often having to spend double the miles (or more).
Does anyone remember the early days of WestJet, where they didn’t nickel-and-dime you for things like luggage and seat selection, and actually advertised these to show how much better they were than Air Canada? Yeah, not anymore.
And it’s worth noting: even when rewards were dollar-based, flights themselves have become more expensive since the COVID19 pandemic. So while $500 technically still meant $500, what that $500 could buy had already shrunk. The move to points simply removes the last bit of transparency.