Tag Archives for devaluation.
Hilton has quietly devalued Honors points yet again. Standard “free night” awards at top properties can now reach 250,000 points — the third hike since December. With no award chart and no notice to members, Hilton continues to erode trust while gutting the value of its loyalty program.
Singapore Airlines will devalue its award prices November 1. They’re also introducing some credit towards elite status for spending through its partners. The award price changes are in many but not all cases modest – and meaningful for a program whose redemptions are already expensive.
Last fall, Virgin Atlantic moved to dynamic pricing for award travel. Virgin has already devalued this new proposition: they’ve doubled the cash surcharges you’ll pay on these cheapest bookings.
United Airlines is making 3 big changes to MileagePlus that no one is likely to be happy about. They’re making changes to award rules, upgrades, and upgrade pricing.
Hilton has jacked up the top redemption price of a room from 150,000 to 200,000 points. That’s a 4x increase in prices in 12 years which is a 300% cumulative increase or average Honors inflation rate of 41.4% – sitting between the current inflation facing Turkey and Argentina.
Japanese Star Alliance carrier ANA is raising the cost of many award tickets on its own flights, effective with travel booked June 24, 2025 onward. At the same time, they’re finally introducing one-way awards for half the cost of roundtrip – both on ANA flights as well as partner awards.
Basic economy fares and changes to the validity of flight credits may be terrible for Southwest Rapid Rewards redemptions, on top of the reduction in points-earning and changes to how award tickets are priced.
Points currently have a fixed value, more or less, getting you the same amount of value towards any ticket you redeem them for. That is changing.
British Airways just treated its high-flyers like a bunch of proper numpties, saying, ‘bugger off, muppets.’ Lufthansa said hold my (German) beer, declaring: ‘Hau ab, ihr Trottel!’
While Marriott eliminated its award charts, that doesn’t mean the Bonvoy program can’t give members advance notice that they’ll be making major changes to the points price of a free night at its hotels, or at least communicate with members at all about their decision to gut the value of points. Yet they chose not to respect their members this way. That leaves us to analyze the data ourselves.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
