George Clooney and Vera Farmiga make impossibly attractive frequent flyers, and film buffs are raving about Up in the Air. Yet while Clooney is being lauded for his performance as the consummate road warrior who gets grounded, there are precious few original insights about business travel in the new movie based on the bestselling Walter Kirn novel.

But you don't come here for film reviews—and you probably shouldn't trust a guy who rarely sees new flicks unless they pop up on an in-flight video monitor. So let's go right to the topic of frequent-travel plans, the supposed pot of gold at the end of the very warped rainbows in Up in the Air.

The best way to describe frequent-travel programs these days is to suggest that they are The Godfather Part III. There's still plenty to love, but you have to be selective and skeptical, and you have to accept that the glory days are over. So here are some essential truths about frequent-travel plans from a frequent traveler who looks a lot more like Luca Brasi than George Clooney.

Frequent-Flyer Programs Aren't Actually About Airlines

When they were initially introduced in the early 1980s, frequent-flyer programs were all about building loyalty to the airline sponsoring the plan. These days, however, fewer than half of the estimated 15 trillion miles in frequent-flyer accounts were earned are from flying. The airlines have turned the programs into massive marketing vehicles for peddling everything from credit cards and wireless phones to dental plans and mortgages. Their goal today is not to win your loyalty for a particular carrier, but to change your buying patterns and sell you stuff in exchange for a private meta currency called miles.

You Don't Own the Miles You Earn

For many years, airline marketing types and talking-head experts (including, unfortunately, your bobble-headed Luca Brasi here) would blithely call frequent-flyer miles "the nation's second currency." They most definitely are not currency in any financially acceptable sense. If anything, they resemble scrip at a company store. You may "earn" the miles with your flying and buying, but you do not own the fruits of your labor. You can only use the scrip how, when, where, and at the exchange rates set by airline sponsors. And they are not freely convertible. Courts—including a federal district court late in October—have consistently ruled over the last 25 years that the miles belong to the airlines, and you have no legal right to resell or barter the ones you hold or use them in any manner not specifically permitted by the airlines.

You're Not the Primary Customer

Airlines don't really consider you the prime customers of frequent-flyer programs anymore. The big players are the businesses, especially banks, that purchase miles in bulk. As they have burned through billions of dollars in capital in recent years, airlines have essentially turned their frequency programs into cash-generating machines. In exchange for dollars to keep their operations afloat, they have presold tens of billions of miles to the financial institutions that issue the programs' affinity credit and charge cards. For example, American Express has advanced Delta hundreds of millions of dollars by buying a stockpile of Delta SkyMiles to issue with various flavors of Amex cards. Citibank has done the same with miles in the American AAdvantage [sic] program. And United Airlines is essentially a vassal of Chase. Chase not only issues United Mileage Plus cards (reportedly the most profitable ones in its vast portfolio of branded affinity cards), it is the airline's lead lender, the major purchaser of its miles, and the carrier's credit-card processor.

Hyperinflation Is the New Normal

While miles are not currency, they are subject to the same economic realities. Frequent-flyer miles are constantly being devalued because of a hyperinflationary cycle that now seems unbreakable. Desperate for hard cash, airlines print more miles to sell to clients like banks. Awash in miles, banks offer gigantic incentives for taking an airline's affinity credit card. (Chase has lately been offering bonuses of as much as 100,000 miles in the British Airways Executive Club.) With so many miles chasing so few airline seats, the carriers raise the cost of awards, thus devaluing the buying power of a frequent-flyer mile.