In 1981, American Airlines launched AAdvantage as a marketing experiment. They thought it might run for a few months.
Forty-five years later, it is one of the most valuable assets the company owns. Not the planes. The promises.
That should tell you something about who the program was really built for.
A mile is a promise the airline makes to you. The catch is that the airline gets to rewrite the promise whenever it likes.
In 2026, most major U.S. programs finished moving to dynamic award pricing. The old chart, where a seat cost a fixed number of miles, is mostly gone. Now the mile cost floats with the cash price.
The miles in your account did not vanish. They just quietly agreed to mean less.
That is the part people miss. Devaluation does not empty your balance. It shrinks what each mile can carry.
Unused points aren't savings. They're frozen intentions.
I have a friend who has been holding 190,000 miles for a business class trip to Japan she has been planning for four years. Every year the trip gets a little more expensive in miles. Every year she waits for the perfect window.
She is not saving. She is watching the price of her own patience go up.
We treat a points balance like a bank account. It is closer to a carton of milk.
The number stays the same. The value has a shelf life.
Here is the behavior worth noticing. We hoard the things that feel like money and spend the things that feel like time. Points feel like money, so we save them. Then we lose them slowly, in a currency we cannot see.
A mile you use this year is worth more than the same mile next year. That has been true for most of the last two decades.
The programs know this. That is why they let you keep the balance. A balance keeps you loyal. A balance keeps you booking with them, checking their app, carrying their card.
The points are yours. The rules were written by someone with a very different goal.
That is not a reason to feel cheated. It is a reason to spend.
The travelers who get the most out of miles are not the ones with the biggest balances. They are the ones who use them close to when they earn them, on trips they already wanted to take.
A deal only matters if it aligns with something you already wanted to do.
So the question is not whether your points will devalue. They will. The question is whether the trip you are saving them for is a real plan or just a someday.
Someday is the most expensive redemption in the program.