On Amex Membership Rewards (MR) devaluation in 2011

I normally don't go into details of value of miles/points since it is very subjective and even personal.  Everyone will value his/her miles/points differently.  Miles/points travel blogs such as View from the Wing, One Mile at a Time, The Points Guy, just to name a few, talk quite a bit about this topic and these things are changing constantly.  So If you are interested, subscribe to them (I actually read them everyday).  However, I feel that I can't omit several major devaluations throughout 2011 that impacted one of our favorite programs - American Express Membership Rewards (MR) in this blog.  If you are not familiar with MR, check out our featured review on three most popular programs that allow points transfer to frequent traveler miles/points - SPG vs. MR vs. UR.  At the beginning of 2011, MR point was one of the most valuable frequent travel currencies out there.  I personally value them at more than 2 cents a piece.  However, several frequent flyer partners devaluated during 2011, which even though was out of control of Amex, substantially weakened the value of MR points.

• Continental Airlines ended its partnership with MR in October 2011.  You can't transfer MR points to CO miles, and if you have Amex Platinum, one of our Top Listers, or Amex Centurion, you won't be able to enter CO Presidents Club any more.  Amex made great effort to compensate this loss, by giving out advance notice, adding Virgin America as a new partner (the exchange rate is 2:1 though), and adding new features to Amex Platinum such as US Airways Club access, $200 airlines incidental reimbursement, Priority Pass Select membership, and so on.  In my opinion, Amex Platinum is still the best card for airport lounge access.  However, other MR cards like our beloved Amex PR Gold, undoubtedly took a huge hit.
• British Airways revamped their program completely in November 2011, even changing the name of the currency to Avios.  For short flights within US or most UK flyers, the change represented a better value.  For US based flyers who like long haul international redemption, the change was disastrous.  For example, a round trip on Cathay Pacific from SFO to HKG costed 40% more miles; a round trip SFO-HKG-DPS used to cost the same as SFO-HKG but now you need to pay additional miles on HKG-DPS segments, costing a whooping 90% more miles than it was before.
• Aeroplan, the frequent flyer program of Air Canada, made several very bad moves in 2011.  They first introduced a new award chart in July, causing almost across the board devaluation - we are talking about 25-50% increase of miles on some most popular routes.  Then they stopped allowing domestic first class segments to be included in international business class award tickets, which really does not make sense.  Finally in November they started charging fuel surcharges on (some) partners like Lufthansa and they said more partners may be included any time in the future.
• All Nippon Airways (ANA) started to charge fuel surcharges on one of the most popular redemption partners - Virgin Atlantic in July.  Here we are talking about $600-800 increase in charges, which essentially close the door to most flyers.
  

Devaluation of frequent travel miles/points is similar to inflation of the real currencies.  However, unlike inflation, most of time the changes happened so suddenly and sharply, making it hard to swallow.  All these changes are not controlled by Amex, but they did hit MR program pretty hard.  By comparison, Chase Ultimate Rewards (UR) is certainly gaining popularity.  British Airways is also their partner; however, Chase did add Korean Air, a SkyTeam member, United Airlines which is merging with Continental so this one does not really matter, and Southwest Airlines which used to be a SPG and MR partner.  SPG, on the other hand, also got hit since it partners with British Airways, Air Canada, and ANA; however, SPG became relatively more valuable due to the fact its other popular partners such as American Airlines and US Airways did not have changes.  We certainly wish that Amex will bring more new partners to MR to make it more competitive since now its major partners in the three alliances - British Airways (oneworld), Air Canada (Star Alliance), and Delta (SkyTeam) represent bad value compared to competition. 

Finally the question is "do you give up your Amex MR card(s) now?"  The answer is not so early.  For one thing, if you have tons of MR points you need to use them before you close the account otherwise you will lose them.  A way to get around is to downgrade your MR card to an MR Express card such as Blue so you keep all the points; note that you can't transfer them to miles/points any more; however, once you do need to transfer just upgrade the card back.  The other thing is that the world of miles change really fast and no one knows if other major players such as American Airlines, US Airways, or the newly merged United Airlines are changing their programs in the near future.