Its my job to do the weekly grocery shopping which I enjoy as I have a system of buying specials at three different grocery stores and saving at least $20 a week.
Now there’s a grocery store in a nearby community that is offering an 175 airmiles with the puchase of $100 worth of groceries. Keep in mind we are talking Canadian dollars. My wife wants me to shop there this weekend.
Does anyone have a handle on the value of an airmile?
Well, in a very literal sense, it’s worth what you can get for it. As for whether or not airmiles are transferable and what the going rate is if they are, I have no idea. I have a feeling, though, that they’re pretty difficult to transfer.
In terms of how much can they save you on flying, that would probably depend on what airlines they’re valid for, what flights that airline runs (and redeems airmiles for) that you’d be interested in taking, and whether or not you’d be likely to take that flight before the miles expire. I ran some back-of-the-envelope calculations a while back and figured that unless you fly to a variety of places on a relatively regular basis, having the money locked up in essentially prepaid airplane tickets isn’t worth it. This is why they used to call them “frequent flier miles”.
It depends on what you plan on using them for, but I usually estimate the value at about one U.S. penny per mile (but possibly as much as US$0.02). Different airlines have different redemption schedules, but a pretty common one in the US is a round-trip ticket (coach class) within the U.S. for 25000 miles. If you’re flying cross-country, this might cost you as much as US$500 (assuming you plan ahead and get your ticket a few weeks in advance). But it’s usually a significant extra hassle to use frequent-flier miles (there aren’t many seats allotted for these tickets, so finding a flight is much harder), which IMO reduces their value. If you want to use them for something else (seat upgrades, etc.) or don’t plan on flying cross-country they will have a different value.
Another way of estimating their value is to find out how much the companies seem to value them. Frequent-flier credit cards offer 1-2 miles per US$1 fairly regularly, which is in line with the ~1% cash-back offers of other cards, so the credit card companies seem to think they’re worth about a penny. (I haven’t seen a frequent-flier card without an annual fee, though, while I have seen cash-back cards with no fee, so the comparison isn’t quite perfect.)
At these values, 175 miles on a $100 purchase doesn’t seem like much to me. YMMV.
This is Air Miles, right? 100 airmiles in that plan will get you a CD, 250-300 a DVD. So 175 would be worth somewhere between a $15-25 CDN bonus. There’s also a lot of gift certificates on their site that you can gauge against. Towards a flight it depends a lot when you’re flying and where. A rough scratchpad calculation has 175 miles being about $15 towards a Vancouver-Toronto flight though (flights within Canada range from 1000-5000 miles).
Another way to consider it would be how much less other merchandise you’d have to spend to get that many miles. 175 miles is $3500 worth of spending on most plans that contribute to this program (1 mile/$20).
Canadian dollars, okay. But are they Canadian airmiles or US miles?
As everyone has said, it depends on how often you fly and how you use the miles. The difference between cash-bought Business Class and stowage (er…“Economy”) on a flight from Denver to China is about $4000 US. I can get an upgrade (if seats are available) for 15,000 miles. That makes them worth about a quarter (25 cents) each.
[sincere]And let me tell you, having the big seat for 15 hours in a plane is worth it to me.[/sincerity]
It depends upon whether your get a head wind or a tail wind.
