How much does one American Airline frequent flier mile equal in 🇺🇸 dollars ($)?
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3Disagree with the votes to close. This question is not price shopping.– reirabCommented May 16 at 19:52
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8This is effectively not an answerable question since AA won't directly exchange your miles for cash. Otherwise, it's entirely dependent on how you value various fare classes, routes, etc. If for whatever reason you're willing to pay $15k for a first class seat tomorrow on a 36 hour, 2 layover flight (SFO-DFW-ONT-SYD), you can claim AA miles are worth upwards of 35 cents each. If you only ever fly basic economy on a route with bad award availability, you probably won't even get 1 cent. And that's before even thinking about transfer partners.– ex-user3761894Commented May 16 at 19:59
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This question is indeed not price shopping but started out as a self answered question with a low quality answer. Even the later answers do not seem to be able to give a direct answer.– Willeke ♦Commented May 16 at 21:21
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1This question probably shouldn't be closed, but one of the down vote reasons is "not useful". Since you can't redeem miles for cash, it's not really useful knowing a cash value.– FreeManCommented May 17 at 11:56
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it can't be exchanged for cash therefore it has no cash value, by definition.– jwentingCommented May 17 at 12:16
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4 Answers
This depends a LOT on your flexibility and the amount of work you are willing to put in. All airlines have unfortunately deployed "dynamic pricing" for awards tickets and prices are all over the place.
I did a quick search on United (since I have miles there) for a flight that I'm currently contemplating. The awards prices vary by a factor of three within the same week. The redemption rates varied from 2.5c/mile to 0.9c/mile.
Nerdwallet quotes 1.2c/mile for United which somewhere in between. Note that you can do a lot better or a lot worse than the "average" price depending on your flexibility.
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"all" should be "most". I believe Southwest e.g. has a direct relationship between miles and dollars– ajdCommented May 16 at 19:50
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1@ajd That's pretty much the extreme of dynamic award pricing. Static award pricing is when there's a set chart where flights from x to y cost z points. Dynamic award pricing is when mileage prices scale (more or less) with money prices. While Southwest isn't an exact fixed value per point, it is pretty close. Most redemptions are in the 1.3-1.5 cent/point range, though some can be up to 1.7 or even a bit more.– reirabCommented May 16 at 19:55
I completely agree with Hilmar's answer that it depends very heavily on how flexible you are and your personal travel patterns.
Redemptions for long-haul business or First class flights tend to be the highest value for most airline miles, but also the least availability at the lower redemption levels.
For AAdvantage miles specifically, The Points Guy currently (May 2024) values them at 1.6 cents/mile. One Mile at a Time values them at 1.5 cents/mile. These valuations seem pretty reasonable to me as a starting point, but, again, it will vary from one person to another. Some redemptions can be as little as around 1 cent/mile, while others can be several cents/mile.
American Airlines AAdvantage miles are worth about 1.7 cents each when booking award flights.
source: Sam Kemmis, NerdWallet.com "What’s the Value of American Airlines AAdvantage Miles? (Calculator)"
As others have said, valuation of reward currencies is generally pretty subjective. As an example, in many frequent flyer programs, there can be an extreme apparent value in premium cabin awards which are operated by partner airlines: it's not exactly unheard of to be able to book Japan Air Lines first class for less than 100k AAdvantage miles within 48 hours of the flight when the cash price for a one-way first class ticket that close-in is $15,000. If that's a redemption you find yourself regularly making, there's an at least facially reasonable case that each AAdvantage mile is worth 15 cents to you.
(The reason this sort of extreme value exists is that an airline (JAL in this case) sees that they have a flight with a(n) (near-)empty first class cabin and decides that they're OK selling tickets at a deep discount to partner frequent flier programs (in this case, they're likely selling the ticket to AA for about $1,000) as an alternative to the seats going out empty, but they're not really interested in dramatically reducing the public sticker price for the ticket: somebody who paid several thousand dollars for the ticket would not like to see that the ticket is available for 80% less! It's also worth considering that those needing to fly long distances on short notice are disproportionately people spending "other people's money" (viz. an employer's or client's money): even if they had the miles, it's easier to pay the cash price and get reimbursed.)
Note that I said "at least facially reasonable". Arguments can be made that valuation shouldn't be based on asking price but be somewhere between the bid and the ask: the fact that the seats aren't selling is evidence that the bid is somewhat lower than the ask. That it's difficult to arbitrage miles for cash is also a consideration: the various programs take a dim view of taking money from people to book award flights for them (it's perhaps the only behavior in most programs that will tend to lead to immediate account termination, and it's far from unheard of for airlines to do sting operations).
Arguably it's the personal valuation that matters most. You can check current prices for the sort of award flights you expect to book in the next year or so (any longer period is likely too speculative: the general tendency is for reward currencies to depreciate ("devalue") in dollar terms, though there are exceptions: arguably Delta SkyMiles, despite a well-deserved reputation over the past decade-plus for massive devaluation are worth more in dollar terms than they were in 2019). Compare the range of mile prices for the flights you expect to take with the cash prices.
