I was on the phone with a customer service representative at Air Miles recently, and she suggested that I get the Gold Westjet 1/$15 AirMiles Mosaik Mastercard. With this card, every $15 spent earns one air mile, however, there is an annual fee of $70 (which she neglected to tell me, but I knew there had to be a fee). Currently our only credit card is a Mosaik Mastercard 1/$40 card which has no annual fee. For the Gold Westjet card option to break even, the following must be true:
where 
is the value of one mile and 
is the number of miles earned in our year. Assuming 
(conservative), solving we get 
. Assuming a higher value per mile (
) we get 
. The latter value works out to $700/month, the former works out to $1400/month. So we would have to spend somewhere around that much per month on our credit card just to break even and make the card worthwhile. I do not think that is going to happen since we have stopped using our credit cards altogether, except when absolutely necessary (online purchases).
The Gold Westjet card has some advantages besides the 1 mile for every $15 spent. For example it allows you to fly anywhere WestJet flies for 1,600 Air Miles. The disadvantage of this is that you have to fly on WestJet.
C = $0.13, according to the table below.
Link
True, that is for an iPod or a gift card for some retail outfit right? The value for flights varies drastically because the price of flights varies so much yet the miles are constant (except for the variation between peak and low seasons).
Your technique is excellent for comparing the value of points between different programs but I need to compare points directly to cash. It seems to be anywhere between $0.11 and $0.23 when looking at flights.
Looking at your table, my rewards rate is even lower because I get one Mile for every $40 spend on my credit card and that is how I think we get most of our Miles. 🙂
Dave: You are right. The table compares points to gift card conversion and you might be able to get a better deal on flights (because the price varies so much). The table is just a rough guide 🙂