Earlier this year I wrote a post about the advantages of membership rewards, such as frequent flyer programs. While that post is still valid, I just discovered how much the cost of redeeming those rewards has inflated over the last few years.

I am an American Airlines loyalist, and I generate about 300K “miles” to use toward travel every year. Now, it used to be that you earned miles by traveling, and you could get status via segments (the number of flights you took) in addition to distance traveled. Now, however, everything is based on spend. The only way I can maintain status is to have the Citi American Airlines credit card, which gives me bonus status points in addition to credit for non-travel purchases. Due to that (and running all of my business expenses as an employee through my personal card) I can still earn about 300K miles per year, as well as maintaining my status.

Before COVID, Andrea and I would take one big trip per year, usually overseas, and it would cost me about 250K miles. If I booked early enough, an international business class seat, round trip, was around 125K miles, so times two you get 250K.

In 2019 I was in a bad car accident, then we had the pandemic, and then just a lot of stuff started happening in our lives, culminating with a complicated move. So we didn’t take our usual big holiday again until last year, when we went to Costa Rica. That trip was paid for via a voucher I got for giving up my seat, so outside of using miles for the occasional upgrade, I hadn’t really tried to book a trip.

Until yesterday.

A friend of mine and his wife are renewing their vows at the end of the year, and this is happening in Argentina. I have never been to South America, much less Argentina, and it sounds fun so we accepted the invitation. I had to book some domestic travel for Andrea using points and that motivated me to go ahead and book this trip, as the sooner you do it, the less miles it will require (plus there tend to be no change fees when redeeming miles so if things change it doesn’t cost me anything).

I am very happy with the American website, especially when it comes to booking reward travel, so I went, entered in our desired dates and selected two people, and I got the following screen:

Ooof. Instead of being 250K miles round trip for the both of us in business it was now over 600K. That is a huge difference. Luckily, I’m pretty happy in “premium economy” especially when traveling with Andrea, since you can get seats on the “two” side and kind of have a little row to yourself.

So I went ahead and booked it, only to discover that those mile figures were per person. So instead of business class at 600K for two, it would have been 1.2 million for two (and here I was thinking I was pretty swank for having just over a million miles).

(sigh)

Anyway, our trip in premium economy will cost just under 400K miles, so at this rate we may be doing one fancy international trip every two years instead of one. I would be curious if any of my three readers have also noticed this huge inflation in redemption costs. I have not noticed it when it comes to redeeming hotel nights. I am a Marriott loyalist and while I don’t use points often, it at least feels to me like they haven’t gone up quite as drastically.

Note: I write these posts mainly for myself and they don’t often result in any other benefit, but as I was writing this I realized something that saved me tens of thousands of miles.

There are two airports close to us. Piedmont Triad International (GSO) is a small regional airport in Greensboro, and it is about fifty minutes away. In fact, I can get there without going through a single stoplight. Being regional, however, it doesn’t have many direct flights and the Admiral’s Club lounge closed during the pandemic and hasn’t reopened. That said, I prefer to travel out of GSO when I can, as it is just much more pleasant than the alternative, which is Charlotte (CLT). However, there are tons of direct flights out of CLT, and if I can get one I’ll fly out of there, even though it is ninety minutes away and involves a lot of stoplights.

Now, when I first learned about this trip I thought I saw that there was a direct flight to Buenos Aires (EZE) from Charlotte, so yesterday when I booked I started from CLT. Unfortunately I must have misread something, because you have to fly through Miami (MIA). No biggie, I like MIA, so I booked the trip.

Well, as I wrote this I remembered that GSO has direct flights to most of the American hub cities, including Miami. I stopped writing and moved our flight to that airport, saving me 50K miles and allowing me to fly out of the easier location.

Go me.