If you search Perplexity for “What are American Airlines miles worth?”, you may get a range of numbers from 1.0 cents each to 2.5 cents each and a lot of hallucinated reasoning behind those numbers too. If you repeat the search, you’ll probably get a different result. Valuing miles is hard, even for AI. So, often we revert to one of the hobby’s normal methods:
- A mile is worth the value of selling it on the grey market
- A mileage redemption is worth the cash that you would have paid without the miles
- A mileage redemption is worth the cash price that the ticket or property is listed for
- A mile is worth 1.0 cents, because most programs let you redeem at that level
A mile is worth your opportunity cost for acquiring it
Those are all fine and good, but sometimes you need a legally defensible valuation for a mile as part of a settlement, tax action, corporate valuation, or similar rigorous process, and the above answers typically won’t cut it because of logical holes big enough to fly an A380 through. Also, judges in particular hate it when you’ve got a hand-waivey answer with variability left up to the eye of the beholder. So, let’s reintroduce a mileage valuation that’s easily defensible:
- A mile is worth what the program will sell it to you for
Right now, I can buy 10,000 AA miles for $338.63, so for the purposes of a legally defensible valuation for miles, AA miles are worth 3.3863 cents each.
Happy Wednesday!
Yes, there’s another common way to determine mileage value.