How Much are Miles Worth in 2025?

We got introduced to the miles games in 2018 and started as complete noobs. We depended on mainlymiles and milelion for quick guides and always got confused between cpm and mpd, and F, J, W, Y. Slowly and surely we learn how to optimize our miles game to our specific needs and travel aspirations. We keep an eye for opportunties and plan ahead. Like most, we revenge travelled post-Covid. Some of the experiences we made redemptions for:

1. New York. SIN-JFK Business Class (J) on Singapore Air, also the world’s longest non-stop flight.

2. Vancouver. YVR-SIN Economy (Y) and Premium Economy (W) on Singapore Air, before SQ stopped serving this route, and concluded that W isn’t worth it.

3. Nagoya. SIN-NGO-SIN Economy on Singapore Air.

4. Maldives. SIN-MLE-SIN Economy, taking advantage of SQ Spontaneous Escape.

5. Istanbul. SIN-IST Business Class on Singapore Air. Mile-chasers’ favourite sweet spot for KrisFlyer.

6. Doha. DOH-SIN Q-Suite on Qatar Airways.

7. Reykjavík. SIN-KEF Business Class on Finnair (for 2025). With a stopover at Helsinki. Also one of the “cheapest” miles to North Europe.

All these were made possible from the miles we accumulated with credit card spending but mostly were bought (ie. Citi Payall had offers to buy miles at 0.8-1.22¢). We will be using 1.22¢ for some comparisons later.

With the great nerfing in 2024, it has become costlier to buy miles. There are also signs of ticket prices trending down as “revenge travel” fizzes. It is time to review the value of a mile. So how do we evaluate the worth of a mile?

Why It Is Important to Know How Much Your Miles are Worth?

Because we want to know if it is a good deal to buy miles or pay for miles. Especially when you may not have sufficient miles for a redemption. Take the following example of HEL-SIN Y-class redemption options on Finnair:

Which option will you pick? If you are optimizing for the cents per mile (cpm), Option A is more attractive 1.19cpm compared to 1.36cpm for Option B.

Knowing the value of your mile can also help you decide if you should upgrade your flight with miles, or use your credit card for overseas spending (when considering your credit card’s FX charges).

We would not spend $$$ on a business class or premium economy ticket, and want to use the least cash for our economy ticket. The miles game is really to fulfil our travel aspirations and to unlock experiences. Your travel goals will differ from ours, and so will the way you value a mile.

Booking with Miles Increases Flexibility

This is especially true when you are visiting a few cities or countries on a trip. Take our USA/Canada trip - we were able to fly from Singapore to New York, and return to Singapore from Vancouver. While we could do “multi-city flights” booking, airline booking platforms limit flight options to their specific alliance or partnerships only.

We can get more creative and adventurous about the places we wanna explore when we are not restricted by the airline choices.

However, you need to ensure you have sufficient miles for the full trip. Compared to a return ticket, it is much more expensive to buy a one-way ticket with cash. We would consider low-cost flights for short legs when possible. Take our trip to Croatia:

1. SIN-IST SQ Business using miles.

2. IST-DBV Turkish Economy using cash (S$262).

3. ZAG-DOH Qatar Economy using miles.

4. DOH-SIN Qatar Business using miles.

Considering the cost of buying miles last year and all the fees involved, the total cost for all the flights for this trip was S$1,986 per pax.

Our Considerations and Baseline

1. We prefer to redeem business class for flights more than 6 hours, and buy economy for shorter flights. This is to reserve our miles for J redemptions for best value.

2. We will use SQ economy class return ticket prices as a starting point to determine redemption value. This is super-conservative where our worst case scenario is we redeem Y tickets and hopefully don’t “lose”.

3. We are willing to plan ahead, as early as when airlines release the award seats (eg. 355 days for SQ). Hence the “2025” in our title. This means we have a few destinations in mind before we buy/redeem. This also allows us to plan our points transfer from credit cards and minimize devaluation mishaps.

4. Valuing miles is both an art and a science. Our analysis is only as good as the data we can get conveniently. The rest depends on your preference and travel aspirations.

All prices are in SGD, unless otherwise stated.

Value Per Mile to Popular Destinations

SQ, and other airlines, price their tickets dynamically. Using Google Flights, we searched for data of trips that are 10 days or more, and took the cheapest return tickets of the year. For comparison, we included prices during Nov/Dec (the most popular travel period for Singaporeans).

From the big differences in Economy (Y) prices, it is obvious that Osaka, Seoul and Melbourne are popular destinations in Nov/Dec.

SQ have promotion fares from time to time that may be cheaper than the prices above (eg. Melbourne from $867) but they are in limited quantities or have bad flight timings. So if you can get them at promo prices, that’s a bonus.

Besides using your miles for Saver Award redemption, there are also additional fees payable using cash. Thankfully, most routes charge the same fees for J and Y. Our formula to calculate value per mile:

Value Per Mile = (Ticket Price - Fees) ÷ Miles Needed

We win as long as how much we pay for our miles is less than the VPM. Eg. If we buy each mile at 1.38¢, exchanging it for economy ticket to Seoul is a money losing deal.

This is where “science” ends and “art” begins. How you value the mile depends on your preferred travel destinations, travel flexibility and your willingness to pay for different experiences.

Our conclusion:

1. For “shorter” popular destinations like Osaka and Seoul, we will check out airline promotion offers to buy economy instead of redeeming miles.

2. Grab opportunities when we can buy miles at 1.38¢ and below.

3. Using SQ Spontaneous Escape, where redemption can be done at a 30% discount, as an anchor point, we set our upper bound at 1.64¢ (ie. 1.15¢ ÷ 70%). So even if we use miles to redeem Y tickets to Seoul during this offer, we don’t “lose”.

4. This also sets the redemption value we want when we exchange our miles. By redeeming flights that are above 1.64cpm, we have a nice arbitrage for our efforts playing the miles game. This is why we reserve miles mostly for business class redemptions.

We must emphasize that this approach only serves as shortcuts we use to determine if opportunities to buy miles are attractive. Take the recent Citi Payall offer for income tax payment. Even when we can potentially buy points below 1.4¢, we decided it just wasn’t worth the hassle.

What About Other Frequent Flyer Programmes?

Using KrisFlyer to establish the value of miles then sets our basis for miles with other FFPs, even though each FFP has different value per mile. This is a good time to remind our readers that you should not be buying miles speculatively.

Aeroplan recently had a 125% bonus points offer for members buying points directly from the airline. Given the attractive SGD/CAD exchange rate, this represents 1.52cpm. And since Aeroplan is also one of OMAAT’s favourite FFPs, this offer made us sit up. We did a quick check for the same SQ ticket for SIN-MEL-SIN:

Curious about how they compare for Star Alliance redemptions, we searched for one-way SIN-BER, with the first leg via SQ, and the second leg via Lufthansa:

If our KrisFlyer cpm is 1.4¢, booking this round trip flight to Berlin would be even more attractive via Aeroplan. Some flights are actually more expensive via Aeroplan redemption. We plan to take a closer look at Aeroplan and see how we can tap into such opportunities as Singaporeans.

Qatar Airways also periodically sells Avios with up to 50% bonus. This represents 2.06cpm. Knowing our range is 1.38-1.64¢, we didn’t find this offer attractive.

There are other FFP that might offer better value then KrisFlyer, and we tend to explore some of them (eg. Avios, Aeroplan, LifeMiles, etc.) in our future posts. Be sure to subscribe to be first to know!

Here is a curated (not the full) list of FFPs you can transfer your Singapore credit card points into, and we included HeyMax too:

Other Things To Note

1. The cheapest economy tickets (ie. Economy Lite) are non-refundable, unlike award redemptions that allow changes at a service fee.

2. Even if you never buy miles or don’t intend to, knowing your value per mile can help you make informed decisions about what to use your miles for. KrisFlyer, and most FFPs, allow you to redeem miles for dining, hotels or car rental. Which leads to our next important point…

3. It is almost certainly not a good idea to use your miles for redemptions other than for full award flights, not even for flight upgrades. The cpm for other redemptions are below 1¢. Milelion has a useful table that illustrates this.

4. We did not discuss the issue of orphan miles. Credit cards have minimum transfer quantities (eg. 10K miles). This will inevitably leave behind some miles after redemption. Maybe, orphaned miles could be useful for non-award flights.

5. Sometimes, banks or airlines offer transfer bonuses, giving you even more value for your points. So it is best to keep your points with your credit card (take note of expiry too!), and transfer when you are planning to redeem miles.

6. Only buy miles from legit sources. Buying miles from other “sources” runs foul of airlines’ T&Cs. This is not worth the risk. #scamalert.

7. There are other ways to value a mile.

8. Miles will expire! So use them as soon as you can, and don’t buy miles speculatively.

9. Knowing the value of a mile also can inform us to choose using a cashback credit card or miles credit card. More on this in a future post.

TLDR

If you find this article useful, forward this TDLR to them 😄

How much do you value your mile?