When I called to complete the booking, the agent did not ask me whether I wanted to use points.

He asked how many.

“Maximum points, I presume?”

“No,” I said. “Actually, the opposite.”

There was a pause. Then he laughed.

“Really? You’re the first person I’ve spoken to who didn’t choose that.”

He did not sound sarcastic. He sounded genuinely surprised.

That, in turn, surprised me: What was going on here?.

Anyone who has booked a flight using points will recognise the menu. You are shown a range of cash-and-points combinations and invited to choose the one that suits you.

The framing is subtle but powerful. Points are presented as something to be used up. Cash is presented as something to be protected. Using more points feels like progress.

Most people never pause to question that framing. They simply move the slider to the right.

That behaviour is not irrational, it’s just not really thought about at all.

The options I was shown looked like this:

Every option was the same seat on the same flight. The only thing changing was how much cash I paid and how many Avios I used.

At that point, the important question was not “which option do I prefer?” but something else entirely.

Instead of asking how many points I wanted to use, I asked:

What price am I being offered for my Avios?

Once you ask that, the list stops looking like a set of choices and starts looking like a series of bids.

To make that explicit, I treated the “maximum points” option as the baseline and asked how much cash the airline was willing to pay me to keep Avios instead.

Put plainly, the airline was offering to buy my Avios back at prices ranging from roughly 0.35p to 0.74p each.

That alone was enough to make the decision clear.

For context, the cheapest cash fare available at the time priced at $335.50.

At the prevailing exchange rate of roughly 1.35 USD to GBP, that equated to about £248.

At first glance, choosing the “maximum points” option of 28,000 Avios plus £2 appears to imply a valuation of roughly 0.88p per Avios, which is well below how I typically think about the currency.

That comparison, however, is incomplete.

The Avios pricing applied to a fully flexible, cancelable ticket, which is exactly what I needed on this trip and ultimately used. The £248 cash fare was the cheapest non-flexible option available, not a like-for-like substitute.

Fully flexible short-haul fares routinely carry a meaningful premium over their lowest cash equivalents. Once that is accounted for, the apparent gap between the implied redemption value and my personal Avios valuation largely disappears.

For clarity, I personally value Avios at approximately 1.4 cents per point in US dollar terms.

At the same exchange rate, that comes out to roughly 1.04p per Avios.

This redemption does not contradict that view. It reflects it.

The mistake would be treating the Avios menu as a pure comparison against the cheapest available cash fare, rather than against the flexible product it was actually replacing.

More importantly, the core insight still holds.

Regardless of where you personally value Avios, the airline itself was offering to buy them back at prices ranging from roughly 0.35p to 0.74p depending on how the question was framed.

That inversion, not a single cents-per-point number, is what made the decision clear.

Comparing each option to the offer with the highest number of Avios (28,000) tells you whether the endpoint makes sense.

Looking at the steps between them tells you something else: how cheaply the airline is willing to trade cash for Avios at each incremental decision.

The curve isn’t smooth.

The first tranche of Avios is bought back extremely cheaply. Then the price rises sharply. Then it softens again near the bottom.

That isn’t random. It’s behavioural pricing.

The cheapest Avios to keep aren’t at the bottom of the menu, but near the top, exactly where most people stop paying attention.

We didn’t end up taking this particular flight.

That wasn’t part of the points decision. Life intervened and we needed to be elsewhere.

The pricing logic was evaluated and the decision was made before that outcome was known. The cancellation doesn’t change the argument.

The agent wasn’t surprised because my valuation of Avios was unusual.

He was surprised because almost nobody ever asks what price they’re being offered.

Loyalty programs rely on default framing. They aren’t trying to deceive anyone. They simply present options in a way that encourages people to stop thinking once a familiar alternative appears.

Most people aren’t bad at math. They just don’t realise a pricing decision is being presented.

Once you see it, it becomes difficult to unsee.

This wasn’t a clever trick or a niche optimisation. It was a basic reframing exercise.

The next time you’re shown a cash-and-points menu, the question isn’t “how many points should I use?”

It’s:

What price am I being offered for them?