Welcome to Freakimilar's Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to Miles and Points.

And each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less, or your money back.

On today's coffee break, is it worth hoarding points? Conventional wisdom in the Points and Miles community is that it's good to earn and burn, meaning like,

earn a lot of points and use them as quickly as possible because devaluations happen all the time.

Sometimes award prices increase. So if you sit on your points too long, it may cost more for the awards you were hoping to book.

So it's better to spend them right away.

So what do you think?

Is that what we should be doing?

Should we always be burning our points as soon as possible?

No, no.

And we're going to talk about why you shouldn't.

Because, you know, it is true that over time points become less valuable.

And so the fear is, yeah, oh, no,

my points are going to become worthless. And that's not probably true. They may become worth less

for specific use cases, but they're not going to become worthless anytime soon. And in fact,

I think it can be really valuable to have a lot of points and miles on hand. I know you do too.

So let's talk about some of the reasons why. First of all, great award availability pops up

randomly and in unexpected places. You never know. Things ebb and flow and you never know when all

of a sudden a bunch of award availability is going to come to be. For instance, I just recently, before we

recorded this, went to French Polynesia,

and I spent that time in French Polynesia thanks to the fact that Air Tahiti Nui suddenly popped up

a whole ton of award space near the end of the booking calendar. Tons of days had two seats available

...