About
The Loyalty Program Devaluation Index is an independent research project by Vidit Chhajed. It has been collected by hand every month since August 2026.
Who I am
I’m Vidit Chhajed, a high school sophomore at Olentangy Orange High School in Lewis Center, Ohio. Behavioral economics drives most of what I work on.
Besides this index, I design and run my own experiments on how people make decisions, and publish them with the raw data. I’m working toward a formal research project in a professional lab.
I’m also building Lieflat, a phone app that runs on the numbers this index publishes: it saves your balances, shows what they’re worth each month, and sends an alert when a program devalues. Join the waitlist or follow @lieflatapp.
More about me and my other work is on my personal website, including my resume.
Why I built this
Airline miles and hotel points work like a private currency, and the company that issues them can change what they buy whenever it likes. Most of those changes are never announced. In every check so far, a China Southern award its own chart lists at 40,000 miles cost 50,000.
Economists have studied private money for a long time, from company scrip to trading stamps, but it’s rare to watch one’s inflation rate month by month. Nobody publishes it for points, so I measure it, the way a statistics office measures prices for a national currency. Points as a private currency explains the comparison.
Travel sites such as TPG and NerdWallet publish one value per program, built partly from real-world prices, but the data behind it isn’t public and they don’t track how that value changes over time. So I measure it in the open. Every month I search the same 88 flights and hotel nights in points and in cash and screenshot every result. The rules were fixed before the first round, so the method can’t be tuned to a result. The research summary covers the method on one page.
Independence
This is an unpaid, independent project. No airline, hotel, bank or card issuer sponsors it or sees it before publication. There are no affiliate links: nothing on this site earns money when you click, sign up for a card, or transfer points. TPG and NerdWallet valuations are cited for comparison only.
Lieflat, my phone app, reads the same published numbers as everyone else. It is a separate product and will have paid plans, and it has no say in what the index collects or publishes.
Nothing here is financial advice. The site records what points bought on fixed searches; what you do with yours is up to you.
Contact
Questions, corrections, research collaborations, or requests for anything behind the published data: email is best.
- Lieflat
- lieflat.vercel.app · @lieflatapp
Corrections
If a number looks wrong, email me the page and what you think is off. I check it against the screenshot for that search.
- If the published number is wrong, I fix it in the data and list the correction below with its date and what changed. Past releases are never edited silently.
- If the number is right but unclear, I improve the explanation and say so here.
- Collection rules are never changed to fix a result. Any rule change is dated and explained in the methodology change log.
Rows with known quirks that are not errors (a sold-out fare, a site that changed its default currency) stay in the data and are listed on the limitations section of the methodology.
Corrections log
| Date | What changed |
|---|---|
| Oct 21, 2026 | October exchange rates for 20 hotel rows were refreshed in the workbook within an hour of the release. Hilton Honors' October change moved from −15.24% to −15.25%, which still rounds to −15.2%, so no displayed number changed. See the page. |