Methodology
Show Your Work
Every number on this site came from somewhere. This is where.
Cents per point is the cash price of the thing you booked, minus the taxes and fees you still had to pay, divided by the points you spent. Times one hundred. That's the whole formula. It's used the same way everywhere on this site — in the trip reports, in the Points Vault, in the advisor. No headline valuations. No numbers borrowed off somebody else's chart.
The formula
CPP = (cash value − cash you still paid) ÷ points redeemed × 100
That's it. There's no weighting, no adjustment, no proprietary index. If a flight would have cost $1,000 and you paid $87 in taxes and burned 40,000 miles, you got 2.28¢ a point. Not 2.5¢ because the program's chart says so. Not 1.5¢ because a portal would have given you that. What you actually got.
A real one, all the way through
Take the Paris and Swiss Alps trip. Eight days, two travelers, everything booked on points except the trains.
| Points redeemed | 279,155 |
|---|---|
| Travel value received | ~$6,079 |
| Blended CPP | ~2.18¢ |
Divide 6,079 by 279,155 and you get 0.0218. Move the decimal and there's your 2.18¢. You can do that arithmetic yourself on any trip report here, and you should, because that's the only reason to trust it.
Where fees are big enough to matter, they come out before the division rather than getting quietly ignored. The Central Europe trip is the clearest example: about $10,510 in travel value, roughly $1,475 of it paid in cash for flight fees and hotel co-pays, which leaves $9,035 of actual value against 378,215 points. That's 2.39¢, not the 2.78¢ you'd get by pretending the fees weren't real. The smaller number is the true one. It goes on the page.
What the cash price means
The cash number is what the same booking was selling for at the time, in the same cabin, on the same dates. Not the walk-up fare. Not the peak-season fare. Not a fare on a different route that happened to look better.
I'll be honest about the soft spot here: a cash price is a judgment call the moment the thing you booked isn't sold for cash in that exact form. A first-class award on a route that only sells full-fare first is the obvious case. Where that happens the trip report says so and shows the fare it's comparing against, so you can disagree with the comparison without having to guess what it was.
Where the default valuations come from
The Points Vault ships a starting cents-per-point for all 31 programs in the catalog. Chase at 2.05¢, Amex at 2.00¢, Hyatt at 1.65¢, and so on down the list.
Run the formula on your own booking with the cents per point calculator →
See every rate we use, and what we actually achieved →
Those numbers are not mine. They're The Points Guy's published valuations, which they recalculate monthly and explain the method for. I use them as the starting default because a shared, publicly documented baseline is more useful to you than a number I made up, and because pretending otherwise would be the exact thing this page exists to avoid.
I don't agree with all of them. Reasonable people argue about these constantly, and a valuation is an opinion dressed as a number no matter who publishes it. That's the point of the next paragraph.
Every one of them is editable, and that's the part that matters. Open Setup, change the value, and your whole portfolio revalues. If you think Hyatt is worth more than 1.65¢ because you always redeem at Category 4 properties, you're right for you, and the site should reflect your redemptions rather than anyone's published average.
One thing worth being clear about: the defaults are a borrowed starting point, but the trip report figures are not. Those are calculated from what I actually paid and what I actually booked, using the formula at the top of this page. The two are different kinds of number and this site should never blur them.
What gets left out
- Cash purchases stay out of the points math. The Norwegian Fjords cruise was bought with money. It sits in the trip's cost table and it stays out of the CPP, because averaging a cash purchase into a points figure would drag the number around for no reason.
- Statement credits are counted where they were used, not as points. A $300 travel credit knocking a positioning flight down is a credit doing its job. It's not a redemption.
- Meals, activities and ground transport aren't in it. They're real money and they're part of what a trip cost, but they aren't what the points bought.
When the numbers were last checked
Transfer bonuses are hand-curated and hold live offers only. When one expires it comes out of the file rather than sitting there greyed out, so the bonuses page is a list of things you can actually do today. Sign-up bonus data works the same way.
The transfer partner map carries its own date and currently reads September 13, 2026. If that date looks old to you when you read this, it is old, and you should check the program's own site before moving points. I'd rather show you a stale date than let you assume something was checked last week when it wasn't.
What this is not
It isn't financial advice, and I'm not a licensed anything. It's arithmetic on public prices, plus my own bookings, published so you can check it.
And the advisor is a language model. It's good at working out which program reaches which airline and what a sensible routing looks like. It is not a live booking engine, it can be wrong about an award price, and award space moves. Confirm anything before you transfer points, because transfers are one-way and no amount of good advice un-does one.
Questions people actually ask
What is a good cents-per-point?
Anything above about 1.5¢ beats cashing the points out through a bank travel portal, which is the floor worth measuring against. Economy trips tend to land near 2¢. Premium cabins are where the number jumps, because a point is worth more against an $11,000 seat than a $600 one — the Norwegian Fjords trip blended to 7.54¢ for exactly that reason. A high number means you put the points against an expensive cash price, not that you are better at this than everyone else.
Where do the default point valuations come from?
They are The Points Guy’s published monthly valuations, used as a starting default rather than calculated here. A shared, publicly documented baseline is more useful than a number invented for this site. Every default is editable in Setup, and the editable part is what matters — a valuation is an opinion dressed as a number no matter who publishes it, so the site should end up reflecting your redemptions, not an average. The trip report figures are a different thing entirely: those are calculated from fares actually paid.
Do you subtract taxes and fees before calculating?
Yes. Cash you still had to pay comes out of the value before dividing. The Central Europe trip is the clearest example: about $10,510 of travel value, roughly $1,475 paid in flight fees and hotel co-pays, leaving $9,035 against 378,215 points for 2.39¢. Ignoring the fees would have printed 2.78¢. The smaller number is the real one.
Does Points Commander earn a commission when I open a card?
No. There are no affiliate links, no referral commissions and no sponsored placements anywhere on the site, and no "apply now" buttons for one to hide behind. The catalog includes no-fee cards and cards that pay nobody anything.
Can I trust the AI advisor’s award prices?
Treat them as a starting point, not a booking. The advisor is a language model reasoning about award charts and transfer partners, not a live availability feed. It is good at working out which program reaches which airline. Confirm the price and the space with the program before you transfer anything, because transfers are one-way.
Found a number that doesn't add up? That's a bug, same as any other. Tell me about it and I'll fix it or show my work.