Spending Money for Travel
One, two, three…ten thousand, fifteen thousand, sixty thousand.
What am I counting? I’m counting up my airline miles. I was admiring all of my airline miles in a few different affinity accounts while logged in to my Points.com account and discovered something interesting and annoying.
(Points.com, for those of you who don’t know, is a site where you can exchange points in various affinity programs that normally wouldn’t let you exchange points. For example, I can exchange points from a gas station program into an airline’s program and vice versa. Not every program is a member of Points.com, but there’s a pretty good list of ones that are.)
I’ve got over 20,000 points in Delta’s SkyMiles that I earned when it was Northwest Airlines, and living in Canada it would be quite hard for me to use the points as I don’t fly to the States all that often. While SkyMiles is a member of Points.com, annoyingly they don’t allow swaps out of the program, so I can’t actually use the points other than to fly on Delta. *sigh*
BUT, Points.com has a new program where you can trade points rather than swap (trade usually costs money, while swapping doesn’t). This would allow me to swap out my SkyMiles into something that I would use, like Air Canada’s Aeroplan points. My basic question to you is this: do I spend the money to trade out the SkyMiles?
Here’s the more detailed question:
- Trading out 15,000 SkyMiles would net me 5,000 Aeroplan points and cost me US$140.
- Buying 7,000 SkyMiles to top up to 30,000 would cost me about US $200, THEN I could trade 30,000 SkyMiles for 15,000 Aeroplan points for US$220.
Option 1 would cost me US$140, while Option 2 would cost me almost US$500. Considering the Canadian dollar is almost at par right now with the US dollar, it’s not as bad a cost as it would have been last year. But do I do it? I’m quite tempted to do so because I will never use those SkyMiles to fly Delta, but transferring them over to Aeroplan would mean I could use them, either to fly or to exchange into a gift card or something.
What do you think? Should I go for it? If yes, which option should I choose?
Are there any other switches you could make, maybe into the Air Miles program? If not, I think I’d go with the first option… Unless you can buy 5000 Areoplan miles directly from Aeroplan for less than $140US. For the second option, when you consider how far 15,000 Aeroplan miles would get you (i.e. for me in Toronto I could fly to NYC, but not home to Halifax), paying $500 for those miles doesn’t seem like a good deal – i.e. I’m fairly certain that I could get a better price paying cash to fly to NYC than the almost $500 it would cost to buy/transfer the points. You have to do what makes most sense to you, but if when you look at how much it would cost you to fly somewhere that 15,000 miles could take you and it comes out being cheaper, that trade wouldn’t be a very good deal.
My two cents – I’d only switch them when you are ready to use the Air Canada miles. That way you have a better idea of what you want to use them for and have a better idea of what a normal ticket would cost you. But, with the dollar being almost at par now it is kind of tempting. Okay, apparently I don’t have great advice on this one. Can you not trade the amount you have? I’m assuming that’s why you have the two options: that you have to do the trade at certain levels of points. If so, then I’d say the second choice is possibly better because you don’t lose any of your miles (of course the miles didn’t cost you anything, theoretically, in the first place).
On a different note, I am very interested to check out points.com and maybe go back and see if I have any points I haven’t used from different places.