Best of the Worst: Why We Still Collect AirMiles

Our number one rule for winning the points game is “every dollar spent must get a point”. It doesn’t matter if it’s our cell phone bill or back to school shopping for the kids. If there’s money being spent it better be earning points. This is easy 90% of the time because we use our American Express Platinum Card or TD Visa Infinite Privilege cards for all of our spending, subscriptions and recurring payments.

The second rule of winning the points game is “double dip wherever and whenever possible”. In addition to earning Amex or Aeroplan points with our payment card, we also want to pick up whatever additional points are available as well. An example would be double dipping on Aeroplan at the LCBO since they also offer Aeroplan points at checkout.

But there’s one 3rd party points program in Canada that’s been around forever but has been profoundly useless for travel: the much maligned AirMiles program.

It’s morphed a few times over the years but has always suffered from a mis-pricing when it comes to using points for flights due to excessive taxes and fees. For many years we would price flights through the AirMiles program and after comparing to just paying for flights with cash it usually turned out that an AirMiles redemption was never worth doing. The cash price was close enough most of the time so why also burn up points.

A recent travel search to compare cash prices vs AirMiles redemptions illustrates this perfectly. Looking at the cash price to fly one-way from YYZ-FLL on Oct 21st, the first direct flight on the list at AirMiles is AirTransat for 809 points and $110.23 in taxes and fees. Is this a great deal? Nope.

The actual cash price, just buying the flight with cash from AirTransat is a mere $156.56, meaning the 809 AirMiles you almost used up were only good to offset $46.33 of your travel expense valuing the miles used at just over 5 cents each. Not a very worthwhile redemption.

While we have been critical of AirMiles for many years, it hasn’t stopped us from continuing to accumulate AirMiles points because of rule #2 above. If there’s points to be collected, you may as well collect them.

So just what value does AirMiles have as a points program?

We’ve found that discounted/clearance merchandise awards and some gift cards (now called e-vouchers) have been worthwhile redemptions in the past.

When our kids were younger we redeemed AirMiles for SportChek gift cards to purchase bikes and sporting equipment, and it was always a worthwhile redemption. For a short window of time we also claimed lots of Delta gift cards. WestJet is a Delta partner so booking at Delta.com out of Toronto would often find you on a WestJet codeshare. And while the Canadian dollar was hanging around par we flew regularly out of DTW and BUF to take advantage of lower airfares.

As a 3rd party points provider, AirMiles is just ok. The selection of rewards is lean, but something is still better than nothing.

But we draw the line at being a rewards member. We would never encourage anyone who wants to win the points game to sign up for an AirMiles co-branded credit card. Ever.