What an award chart is
An award chart is a price list. That is the entire concept. The airline publishes a grid with regions down one side (North America to Europe, North America to Asia, and so on) and cabins across the top, with a fixed number of miles in each cell. If a saver-level seat existed on your dates, the chart told you exactly what it cost. The same award cost the same miles in March and on Christmas Eve. The price was the price.
Charts came in a few flavors. Region charts priced by origin and destination zone. Distance charts priced by how far you actually fly (Aeroplan still works this way). Hotel charts priced by property category rather than route. The mechanics varied, but the promise underneath was identical: publish the number, honor the number.
And that promise is what separated miles from arcade tokens. A mile had a defined redemption price you could read in advance, which made it something you could plan around, save toward, and meaningfully value. Everything in this article flows from what happened when the grid disappeared.
Why charts mattered
Predictability, mostly. A published chart gave your balance a finish line. You knew the number you were saving toward, you knew when you had crossed it, and the target did not move while you swiped.
Charts also created the entire concept of a sweet spot. When a chart's fixed price sat far below the cash fare for the same seat, the gap was yours to keep, and the chart guaranteed the gap would still be there next month. Every famous redemption in the history of this hobby started life as a chart row that somebody read carefully.
There was a quieter benefit too. Charts disciplined the airlines. Raising prices meant publishing a new chart, announcing a devaluation, and absorbing a news cycle of angry blog posts. The friction did not stop devaluations (nothing stops devaluations), but it slowed them down and forced them into the open. You generally got notice. You could burn your balance before the new prices hit.
The great unpublishing
Delta moved first. In the mid-2010s the SkyMiles award charts simply came down off the website, with no replacement grid and not much in the way of announcement (the pages just went away quietly, which tells you how proud everyone was of the change). From then on, a SkyMiles award cost whatever the search results said it cost that day.
United held out longer, then dropped its published chart for travel from late 2019. American kept a chart on paper while routing more and more of its inventory through dynamically priced Web Specials, until the chart stopped describing anything you could actually book. The dynamic era won.
What replaced the grid is pricing that floats, usually in some relationship to the cash fare. Cheap flight, often a cheap award. Expensive flight, expensive award. The full mechanics (and what they did to mileage values) get their own article in Dynamic Award Pricing Explained, but the short version is simple: the airline no longer tells you what your miles are worth, because the answer now changes by the day.
Why did they do it? Money, obviously, but a specific kind. A published chart is a liability sitting on the loyalty program's books: every cheap row is a standing promise that someone's miles can claim an expensive seat. Untether the price and the liability shrinks on command. The airlines framed the change as flexibility, and to be fair, dynamic pricing did produce some genuinely cheap off-peak awards. It also produced the quiet ability to charge anything at all.
Who still publishes a useful chart?
More programs than you might expect. Charts survived in the places where predictability is the product.
- Air Canada Aeroplan. Rebuilt in 2020 around a distance-based partner chart. The miles price depends on how far you fly and which zone you fly in, and you can look it up before you book. For Star Alliance partner awards it remains one of the most legible systems anywhere.
- Alaska Mileage Plan. Still publishes partner award pricing, and its partner charts are the main reason Alaska miles carry an outsized reputation. The charts have been adjusted over the years, but a chart that moves occasionally still beats no chart at all.
- World of Hyatt. The hotel side's best-known holdout. Properties sit in published categories with published point prices (plus peak and off-peak tiers), so you can know what a room costs before you look. Hyatt being a 1:1 Chase Ultimate Rewards partner is a large part of why that currency stays in demand.
- Distance-based Avios programs. British Airways and its Avios siblings price partner flights in distance bands, which works like a chart even when it is not formatted as one.
Notice the pattern. The survivors are mostly programs whose business is booking other carriers' planes and other companies' hotels. It is hard to sell partner awards without telling people the price.
Valuing miles when there is no chart
Without a grid to consult, valuation becomes empirical. You measure it the way you would measure anything else: by sampling.
Pick a few trips you would genuinely take. Price each one in miles and in cash, on the same dates, then divide dollars by miles. One data point is noise. Five or six start to form a range, and the range is the real answer. For the big domestic programs it often lands somewhere around a cent per mile, lower on cheap fares, higher if you consistently book premium partner cabins. (How miles get earned and spent in the first place is covered in How Airline Miles Work.)
Two practical notes on the sampling. First, value your miles against trips you would pay cash for anyway; comparing against a fantasy fare you would never buy inflates the answer and flatters the balance. Second, run the numbers on dates you can actually travel. A mile is not worth its Tuesday-in-February price if you can only fly during school breaks.
| Chart era | Dynamic era | |
|---|---|---|
| Price source | A published grid by region and cabin | An algorithm, usually tracking the cash fare |
| Peak dates | Same price, if a saver seat existed | Prices float up, sometimes steeply |
| Saving toward a goal | A fixed, knowable target | A moving target you discover at search time |
| Devaluations | Announced. Public. Usually with notice. | Silent drift, no announcement required |
That last row is the one that changes behavior. In the chart era a devaluation was an event you could react to. Now it is a slope.
What chartless pricing means if you hold a balance
It means your miles are a floating-rate asset where the other side sets the rate. No notice, no changelog, no chart to compare against. The program can reprice the award you were saving for tonight, and the only way you will find out is by searching tomorrow.
It also changes what notice means. Chart-era devaluations came with effective dates you could act before. Drift-era devaluations arrive as anecdotes: someone on a forum notices an award costing more than it did last month, others confirm, and that thread is the entire announcement. By the time the pattern is visible, the better price is already gone.
So the old advice (hoard miles toward a big trip someday) has aged badly. A balance with a booked redemption attached is fine. A balance waiting for "someday" is quietly leaking expected value while it waits, and the leak only ever runs one direction. Earn-and-burn was always good practice. Chartless pricing made it the whole game.
There is one partial hedge: keep value in programs that still publish prices, or in bank currencies that can transfer to them. A chart cannot stop a devaluation, but it makes the price legible while it lasts.
The fixed price you can still get
One number in this market is still published the old way: a cash offer. When iBuyPoints quotes a balance, the quote is a specific dollar figure for your specific miles, confirmed by a specialist on the phone and paid via PayPal. It does not float with the cash fare, and it does not require finding award space on a Tuesday in shoulder season.
For travelers who love the search, dynamic pricing is a puzzle with occasional jackpots. For everyone holding miles they will not realistically optimize, selling the balance converts a floating asset into a fixed one.
The airlines unpublished their prices. Yours can still be a number on a page.