We have been a PNC (formerly National City) customer for the last five years or so. We were signed up for their Points program (visaextras) from the time it was announced I believe. Recently we noticed we have been expiring points, so I hopped on the site to see what kind of cheap freeness we could get for our imaginary currency.
I was surprised there actually are some things of value, however you seem to need a unnatural amount of points to get the really cool stuff. I started wondering if they had an internal "point = $x" equation to figure out how to price stuff. So, I wasted a couple hours to find out.
It took some manual scraping, but I eventually got a nice, albiet small, sample of items to analyze.
One thing you'll notice right away, is that it's clearly not even accross the board. However, what jumps out at me is that, for the most part, they seem to have a static value of 1 point = $0.0025. It's not exact, but on a majority of the gift cards, this is what it came to.
The high dollar gift cards seem to have a significantly higher value, up to $0.003 on the $500 Talbots card. So of the items I compared, that is by far your best "bang for your point."
*Also of note, all prices are lowest available price available via internet order for physical items. On Gift Cards it is the actual value of the card.
