How much are Airline Miles worth in India?

The Bottom Line

We estimated the value of rewards points of 5 major frequent flyer programs in India. The values of a reward point ranges from 30 paise/point for Flying Returns by Air India & InterMiles to Rs.1/point for 6E Rewards by Indigo.

Table 1: Value of a point

Airline	Reward Point	₹/Point
Indigo	6E Rewards	1.00
Vistara	Club Vistara	0.90
Spice Jet	Spice Club	0.50
Air India	Flying Returns	0.30
InterMiles	InterMiles	0.30

Indigo and SpiceJet have the simplest programs. The value of a point is fixed by both airlines and the points can be used to partly or fully pay for any flight on their network. This means as long as there is a seat available on a flight, you can use your points to book it, partly or fully. You get the same, fixed value, no matter how you use the points.

InterMiles, Vistara and Air India have a more traditional frequent flyer program with quotas on each flight for redemption bookings and no fixed relationship between the cash fare for the flight and the number of points needed to redeem that booking. So when and how you redeem the points matters with these airlines.

The availability of award redemption flights on these two Airlines ranged from only 35% on Air India’s domestic flights to 88% on Vistara’s domestic flights. The InterMiles program had nearly 100% availability on domestic flights.

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Why you should trust us

We spend 10s of hours researching the 5 major frequent flyer programs in India – 6E Rewards, Club Vistara, Flying Returns by Air India, Spice Club and InterMiles. We crawled through their websites, spoke and chatted with their customer service representatives, and opened frequent flyer accounts.

We compared the price of tickets for 100s of flights on each airlines on different dates – for cash and using frequent flyer miles.

We looked at domestic and international flights, during peak and off peak seasons. We tried booking flights far in advance and at short notice.

As far as possible we tried to compare prices for all airlines on the same day so that the results were comparable.

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Who this is for

Frequent flyer points (often called airline miles or just miles) are a common currency for many credit cards. If you want to maximize the rewards you collect from your credit cards, knowing the value of various airline miles can help you make a better choice.

Often there are deals offered by banks or airlines where you are gifted miles or have the option of purchasing miles for a special rate. You need to know the value of a mile to understand whether the deal is worthwhile or not.

If you are trying to redeem an award flight (i.e. book a flight using miles), it is good to have the value of a mile in mind so you can figure out if you are getting a good deal or if you are better off buying that ticket for cash and saving your miles for another time.

Many people have raised optimizing the value of frequent flyer miles to an art form. This guide is for the rest of us – people who would like to get good value for money but do not want to jump through a thousand hoops to wring out every last paisa.

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How we researched

Indigo and SpiceJet have simple rewards programs. They specify the rupee value of a reward point on their website and rewards points can be used to redeem any ticket in part or in full.

This means you are sure to be able to redeem your miles as long as you fly with that airline and you know exactly how much your miles are worth.

Air India, Vistara and InterMiles have a more traditional frequent flyer program. They specify the price of each flight in cash and in miles, appear to have a fixed quota for the number of seats on each flight that can be booked with miles (redemption bookings) and don’t have a fixed value of a mile.

This means the value you can realize for a reward point often varies depending on the flight you are taking.

The fixed quota for redemption bookings on each flight also means you are also not guaranteed to get a seat on the flight you want unless you happen to book them well in advance of the flight date.

For Air India, Vistara and InterMiles, we calculated the value of a mile by comparing the cash fare for 100s of flights with the miles needed to book the same flight.

We first fixed four sets of travel dates, two each for peak and off peak periods.

Table 2: Travel Dates Tested

Travel Period	Peak?	Other Criteria
16 Sep – 18 Sep 2022	Off-Peak	Weekend, Short notice
11 Oct – 13 Oct 2022	Off-Peak	Mid-week, 1.5mth away
21 Oct – 25 Oct 2022	Peak	Weekend, 1.5mth away
24 Dec 2022 – 02 Jan 2023	Peak	Long break, 4mths away

For each set of travel dates, we selected 6 domestic flights and searched for one-way and round trip fares for each. We simultaneously tried to book the same flights (one-way & round trip) using the miles redemption services provided all 3 platforms.

Table 3: Domestic Flight Routes Tested

Origin	Destination
Bangalore	New Delhi
Mumbai	Kolkata
Mumbai	Goa
Mumbai	Chennai
New Delhi	Mumbai
New Delhi	Patna

We also selected 8 international flights (mix of long distance and short distance) and repeated the same exercise.

Table 4: International Flight Routes Tested

Origin	Destination
New Delhi	Dubai
Mumbai	London
Mumbai	Singapore
New Delhi	Bangkok
New Delhi	Paris
New Delhi	New York
New Delhi	San Francisco
New Delhi	Sydney

In each case we tried to ideally look for the most convenient flight, one that we would usually want to take ourselves e.g. non-stop, after office hours on weekdays or most convenient arrival time at destination.

For award redemptions we also noted down whether a seat for the desired flight was available or not. We discounted the value of the mile if award redemptions were rarely available.

In cases where our preferred flight was not available, we still collected data on the cash booking for that flight although this was not used in our base case valuation of the miles.

Table 5: Award Flight Availability

Airline	Domestic	International	Total Availability
Indigo	100%	100%	100%
Vistara	88%	58%	80%
Spice Jet	100%	100%	100%
Air India	35%	69%	51%
InterMiles	92%	97%	94%
Source: Airline & Travel Booking Websites as on 01-Sep-2022

The taxes due on each flight ticket must be paid with cash, even if you make an award redemption. We accounted for this in our calculations by ignoring taxes on both types of bookings.

In estimating the value of a mile we limited our analysis to economy class flights.

Many mile junkies recommend booking business class tickets to maximize the value of your frequent flyer points. While this may indeed result in higher estimated value of a mile, we think this is not appropriate for most people.

This is for a couple of reasons. First, most people do not buy business class tickets for their personal trips. So it doesn’t make sense for them to buy business class tickets just to get a better notional value for their miles. Optimizing the value of miles isn’t a goal in and of itself for them. They want to get to their destination in the most efficient way possible.

Second, if the miles in your hand were converted to cash (lets say even at the higher conversion rate you get for business class tickets), would you then use them to buy a business class ticket instead of economy class? We think the answer would be no for most people.

Put another way, if you are not willing to spend cash on a business class ticket but are willing to spend miles on it, then implicitly you are yourself valuing the miles less. Funnily this leads to a higher calculated value of a mile but that is not very useful for most people.

Of course, if you are the type of person who travels business class for personal trips then our calculation provides a very conservative value of miles for you and you may end up doing a lot better.

All this is only relevant for Flying Returns by Air India, CV Points by Vistara and InterMiles since the value of miles in Indigo and SpiceJet’s reward programs is fixed.

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Value of an Air India Flying Returns Point

We valued Air India’s Flying Returns points at Rs. 0.30 each (30 paise / mile) based on data from 136 flights. This included 24 domestic one-way journeys, 24 domestic round trip journeys (48 flights) and 32 international round-trip journeys (64 flights).

We found that Air India rarely has award redemptions available on domestic flights. Award redemptions were possible on only about 1/3 of the domestic flights we tried to book.

The situation is much better with international flights as award redemptions were available for 44 out of 64 flights i.e. more than 2/3 of the flights.

In total award redemption was possible only half the time among the flights we tried to book.

Table 6: Redemption Flight Availability – Air  India

Availability	Total Flights	Available Flights	% Available
One-Way	24	9	38%
Roundtrip	48	16	33%
Total Dom	72	25	35%
International	64	44	69%
Total	136	69	51%
Source: Airline & Travel Booking Websites as on 01-Sep-2022

Using our raw dataset we calculated a value of 60 paise / mile for domestic redemptions and 43 paise / mile for international redemptions. This included data for all flights even when a award redemption booking was not available.

This overstates the value of a mile. If an award booking is not available on a flight, that flight is likely seeing strong demand. As a result, it is likely that the fares for such flights are higher than the average flight where award redemption is available.

The number of Flyer Returns points needed for a leg are fixed for Air India. For e.g. a one-way flight from Mumbai-Chennai can be redeemed for 10,080 points. This is fixed whether it’s a peak or an off-peak flight.

So if the cash fare for a flight increases, the calculated value of miles for that flight also increases, even as it becomes less likely that you will score that redemption ticket.

To adjust for this, we only used the data points where the award redemption was actually available. This reduced the value on a mile on domestic flights to about 50 paise. On international flights, the value remained unchanged at 43 paise.

Table 7: Value Of Flying Returns Points On Redemption

₹/Mile	One-Way Flights	Roundtrip Flights	All Domestic Flights	International
Average	0.51	0.51	0.51	0.43
Median	0.51	0.5	0.51	0.41
Maximum	0.67	0.83	0.83	0.81
Minimum	0.25	0.29	0.25	0.13

Since the availability on domestic flights was very poor, we decided to use the value for international flights in our base case. To account for an availability rate of 69%, we further reduced the 43 paise to 30 paise (43 paise x 69%, rounded up to nearest 10 paise).

Why adjust for lower availability? Because lower availability means on average you need to wait longer to redeem an award flight that you really need. There is a higher chance that the miles expire unused or you end up using them on a flight you would not have otherwise taken.

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Value of a Club Vistara Point

We valued Club Vistara Points at 90 paise / mile based on data from 96 flights. This included 24 domestic one-way journeys, 24 domestic round trip journeys (48 flights) and 12 international round trip journeys (24 flights).

The reason for fewer international journeys is that Vistara does not operate too many international flights. We were only able to get data for 3 international destinations for now.

We found Vistara has much better availability for award redemptions – it was possible to get bookings for nearly 90% of the domestic flights we tested. In fact, except for the Mumbai – Goa flights, the availability of award redemptions was 100% on all other flights.

Unlike Air India, Vistara had lower availability of award bookings for international flights. We saw awards seats available in only 14 of the 24 flights we searched for.

Overall, award redemptions were available on 80% of the flights we looked at.

Table 8: Redemption Flight Availability – Vistara

Availability	Total Flights	Available	% Available
One-Way	24	21	88%
Roundtrip	48	42	88%
Total Dom	72	63	88%
International	24	14	58%
Total	96	77	80%
Source: Airline & Travel Booking Websites as on 01-Sep-2022

Using our raw dataset we calculated a value of Rs. 1.13 / mile for domestic redemptions and 66 paise / mile for international redemptions with Vistara. This included data for all flights even when a award redemption booking was not available.

As discussed in the section on Air India, this overstates the value of a mile. Ignoring the unavailable flights, we got a value of Rs. 1.03 / mile for domestic bookings. We adjusted this to account for <100% availability (as with Air India) and settled on a final value of 90 paise / mile (Rs. 1.03 x 88%, rounded to nearest 10 paise).

Table 9: Value Of Club Vistara Points On Redemption

₹/Mile	One-Way	Roundtrip	Total	International
Average	1.00	0.97	0.99	0.51
Median	1.03	1.01	1.03	0.54
Maximum	1.70	1.52	1.52	0.73
Minimum	0.40	0.43	0.40	0.25

Because of the very limited international coverage of Vistara, we decided to ignore the international flights in our calculations for now.

Unlike Air India, Vistara does change the number of miles needed for a flight leg depending on how busy that flight is. For e.g. The New Delhi – Patna round trip booking was available for 9,000 CV Points on 16-18 Sep 2022.

For 24 Dec ’22 – 02 Jan ’23, the same journey cost 19,500 CV Points (Christmas / New Year peak season). For the Diwali weekend (21-25 Oct ’22) the cost spiked to 30,000 CV Points.

This dynamic pricing of award redemptions probably explains why the availability is so much better for Vistara than for Air India.

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Value of an InterMile

We valued an InterMiles mile at Rs. 0.30 each (30 paise / mile) based on data from 136 flights. This included 24 domestic one-way journeys, 24 domestic round trip journeys (48 flights) and 32 international round-trip journeys (64 flights).

Because you can book flights from most airlines using InterMiles, the availability was nearly 100% for both domestic and international flights.

Table 10: Redemption Flight Availability

Availability	Total	Available	% Available
One-Way	24	18	75%
Roundtrip	48	48	100%
Total Dom	72	62	92%
International	64	62	97%
Total	136	128	94%
Source: Airline & Travel Booking Websites as on 01-Sep-2022

Using our raw dataset we calculated a value of 31 paise / mile for domestic redemptions and 20 paise / mile for international redemptions with InterMiles. This included data for all flights even when a award redemption booking was not available.

As discussed above, this overstates the value of a mile. Because of the nearly 100% availability on InterMiles, however, this impact is not very meaningful for InterMiles.

For InterMiles we chose to rely upon the value calculated from domestic redemptions only. This results in a slightly favourable treatment for InterMiles since the value of a mile for international flight bookings is almost a third lower.

Table 11: Value Of InterMiles On Redemption

₹/Mile	One-Way Flights	Roundtrip Flights	All Domestic Flights	International
Average	0.30	0.30	0.30	0.21
Median	0.30	0.30	0.30	0.22
Maximum	0.39	0.42	0.42	0.29
Minimum	0.15	0.19	0.15	0.08

Because of this large gap, it probably makes sense to have two different values for miles – one for domestic and one for international redemptions.

We chose domestic in the base case for InterMiles because we believe vast majority of flights taken by people in India are domestic. However if you primarily fly international then you should use the value based on international flights only.

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How to use this information?

First, it is important to understand that just because a 6E Rewards point is worth more than an InterMile does not mean that you should always prefer 6E Rewards. It is helpful to think of these rewards points as currencies for the respective Airlines’ ecosystems.

Just because a US Dollar is worth more than an Indian Rupee does not mean you always choose the US Dollar. You must ask how much of each you are getting and what is the exchange rate between them.

Valuing different airline miles above, allows us to figure out the exchange rates between all of them and then compare the reward programs correctly.

Table 12: Cross Rates for Airline Reward Programs

Cross Rates	Indigo Point	CV Point	Spice Club	Flying Returns	Inter Mile
Indigo Point		0.9	0.5	0.3	0.3
CV Points	1.1		0.6	0.3	0.3
Spice Club	2.0	1.8		0.6	0.6
Flying Returns	3.3	3.0	1.7		1.0
InterMile	3.3	3.0	1.7	1.0

The first column in this table tells what 1 6E Rewards point is worth in terms of other miles e.g. 1  6E Rewards is worth 2 Spice Club points and 3.3 InterMiles. The third column shows that 1 Spice Club point is worth 1.7 Flying Return Points.

There are 2 ways we can use this information, for award flight redemptions and for optimizing credit card rewards.

Redemption Bookings: Knowing the value of an airline mile lets you make a better decision when choosing to buy a ticket for cash or to redeem one for points.

For example, on the day we collected data for this post, a New Delhi to Patna return ticket on Vistara for 24 Dec ’22 – 02 Jan ’23 was available for Rs. 11,260 or for 19,500 CV Points (both excluding taxes).

This means you are getting a value of Rs. 0.58 per CV Point if you book this flight using Points. Since our estimated value of a CV Point is Rs. 0.90, this amounts to selling your points way too cheaply.

You might be better off booking this flight for cash and use your Points at another time when you get better value for them. The exception to that would be if your points were about to expire.

Credit Card Rewards Redemption: A number of credit cards offer Airline Miles as rewards for using them. Many credit card providers also allow you to convert the reward points you earn on their cards into Airline Miles. Knowing the value of Airline Miles lets you figure out whether that conversion makes sense or not.

For example, HDFC Bank’s Diners Club Privilege card allows you to redeem rewards points for cash, for airline miles (InterMiles and CV Points) and to buy products / book flights on their SmartBuy platform. The points can be worth a fair bit. So how should you redeem those points?

Based on the redemption options above and our valuation of various miles, you choices are to redeem the reward points for:

1. Flight & Hotel Bookings on SmartBuy at Rs. 0.50 per point
2. CV Points at Rs. 0.45 per point (0.5 CV point per reward point)
3. Products in their catalogue at Rs. 0.35 per reward point
4. Cash at Rs. 0.20 per reward point
5. InterMiles at 0.15 per reward point (0.5 InterMile per reward point)

There is a huge difference between #1 and #5. Despite both being classified as Air Miles, the difference between #2 and #5 is also huge.

What this tells you is that if you are a Diners Club Privilege cardholder with points to redeem, you should redeem them on the SmartBuy platform if possible. If not, consider converting them to CV Points.

You should almost never convert your Diners Club Privilege reward points into InterMiles. The only exception to this maybe if you already have some InterMiles that are about to expire and you need a few more to redeem the ticket you want.

Apart from these two use cases, we also use the value of these air miles to evaluate all the credit cards in the market and figure out which ones are best. You can read more on how we do that here and read our recommendations here.