A figure has been circulating through loyalty coverage in 2026: airline miles have lost roughly 67 percent of their purchasing power since 2014, attributed to the loyalty consultancy IdeaWorksCompany. It is a striking number, it is directionally consistent with what frequent flyers believe, and it is repeated without qualification.
We could not trace it to an IdeaWorks publication. It does not appear in the firm’s press releases, and it does not correspond to the methodology of the reward research IdeaWorks actually runs. The sourcing we could find leads back to a secondary blog post rather than to the consultancy credited with producing it.
This matters beyond one statistic. Mile-value claims are unusually easy to construct and unusually hard to check, which makes them a reliable vector for numbers that sound rigorous and are not. The useful exercise is not to argue about whether 67 percent is plausible — it is to understand what a defensible long-run measurement of mile value looks like, and what IdeaWorks genuinely publishes.
What IdeaWorks Actually Measures
IdeaWorks runs two recurring pieces of reward research, and neither is a purchasing-power index.
The US Domestic Reward Report assesses six US airlines — Alaska, American, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest and United. The 2025 edition, a 62-page report, was built on 1,200 booking queries conducted during February 2025 for travel in the June-to-October period.
The Reward Seat Availability Survey, produced with CarTrawler, measures something different again: how often a reward seat can actually be booked. It has historically rested on more than 7,000 booking queries across roughly 25 airline frequent flyer programs.
Note what both of these are. They are point-in-time price and availability surveys built from a defined number of live booking queries against a defined set of programs. They measure what a specific reward seat cost in a specific window. They are not longitudinal indices of a mile’s purchasing power, and they do not have a 2014 baseline.
The Numbers IdeaWorks Did Publish
The 2025 US Domestic Reward Report produced a headline finding that is genuinely useful, and it is a more careful claim than the one circulating.
Award prices across the six surveyed carriers rose approximately 36 percent since 2019, against roughly 24 percent inflation in the broader economy over the same period. So reward prices did outpace general inflation — by about 12 percentage points across six years, not by anything resembling two-thirds of value.
Underneath that average, the dispersion is enormous. Individual airlines ranged from a 9 percent increase to a 153 percent increase. And one carrier moved the other way entirely: American AAdvantage redemptions in this category got about 21 percent cheaper over the six years.
The report also found that compared with the prior year’s study, all six airlines charged fewer points on average for a ticket. American returned the highest reward value per mile at 1.6 cents, and Southwest posted the highest Reward Payback for economy travel, returning 7.3 cents of reward value for every 100 cents spent on airfare.
IdeaWorks president Jay Sorensen located the real erosion somewhere the price data does not capture directly, noting that the accrual penalties most airlines place on basic economy fares have “a crushing effect on the value of frequent flyer programs.”
Why the Two Framings Are Not Interchangeable
“Award prices rose 36 percent since 2019” and “miles lost 67 percent of their value since 2014” are not the same claim expressed differently, and one cannot be derived from the other.
They measure different quantities. An award price is points required for a seat. Purchasing power is points required relative to what the seat costs in cash. If award prices rise 20 percent while cash fares rise 20 percent, award prices went up and purchasing power did not move at all. Any devaluation claim that ignores the cash denominator is incomplete.
They use different baselines. 2019 is a pre-pandemic normal year. 2014 sits before the major US carriers completed the shift to revenue-based earning, which makes it a legitimate starting point for a long-run story — but a 2014 baseline requires 2014 data collected on a consistent methodology, and a survey that runs 1,200 queries in a single February cannot retroactively supply it.
Averages conceal the actual distribution. The 9-to-153 percent range in the IdeaWorks data is the most important finding in it. A single network-wide devaluation percentage, applied to “miles” as though they were one currency, discards the fact that the programs diverged violently — including one that got cheaper.
Reading Any Mile-Value Claim
Four questions, in order, dispose of most bad numbers.
What is the denominator? If the claim compares points-then to points-now without reference to cash fares, it is measuring award price inflation and should say so.
What is the sample, and when was it collected? A defensible study names its query count, its programs, its collection window and its travel window. IdeaWorks does this. Claims that do not are usually estimates presented as measurements.
Is it an average, and what is the spread? An average across programs that ranged from −21 percent to +153 percent describes none of them.
Does the number appear in the cited organisation’s own publication? This is the check that fails most often, and it is the cheapest one to run. Research firms publish press releases. If a figure attributed to one cannot be found in its own materials, the attribution is doing work the evidence is not.
What Is Actually True
Airline miles are worth less than they were, and the erosion is real. But the honest version is narrower and more useful than the circulating one: award prices at major US carriers rose roughly 36 percent between 2019 and 2025 against about 24 percent general inflation, with wildly uneven results by program, and with the sharpest structural damage coming from basic-economy accrual penalties rather than from headline award pricing.
That is a smaller, better-supported claim than “67 percent since 2014.” It is also the one a member can act on, because it identifies which programs moved and in which direction. A single dramatic percentage attached to a respected name tells you nothing about where to put your next mile.
