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I tell them what I tell you: Spend the miles. Now. Stop "banking" miles for fantasy holidays that may never materialize or a retirement that won't be filled with flying freebies.

I have a sound bite, one I pull out whenever a radio or television show wants snappy patter about frequency-plan foibles. "Airlines," I say gravely, "do lousy jobs being airlines. Why would you think they are good banks?"

Then I produce a laundry list of reasons why you shouldn't treat your frequent-flyer accounts like bank accounts:

• Airlines don't pay interest, not even the miniscule, basis-points pittances that real banks pay on real money.
• Airlines reserve the right to change rules without notice or appeal. Rules changes usually decrease the value of your mileage stash.
• Frequent-flyer miles are not a "currency," and airlines are free to manipulate values as they see fit without regulatory oversight.
• Mileage inflation—there are now tens of trillions of unclaimed miles—is horrific and airlines are constantly ratcheting up the price of awards.
• U.S. airlines are pruning their global route maps. More and more of the most desirable holiday places are farmed out to international partner airlines, and those carriers almost always charge much higher award prices and have many fewer seats earmarked for awards.

Guess what, fellow flyers? The case against banking your miles is getting dramatically stronger. In fact, it's urgent that you cash in as many miles as practical to protect yourself against what's on the horizon. A structural change to the nature of airline frequency programs will dramatically reduce the value of your current stash in the next 12 months.

A year from today, maybe less, business travelers will be looking at an entirely new frequent-flyer landscape. Points, not miles, will be the new paradigm.

Since the beginning of frequent-flyer time--that'd be May, 1981, when American Airlines launched American AAdvantage and United Airlines responded 10 days later with Mileage Plus--the programs were based on miles flown. The scrip you earned was called miles. The more airline miles you flew, the more mileage scrip you earned.

The simplistic financial equation made sense in 1981 because a mile of airline flying bore some passing relationship to the revenue an airline received for carrying you. But fare structures have changed so fundamentally in the intervening 30 years that the raw number of miles you accrue doesn't tell an airline much about your financial contribution to its revenue stream.

Moreover, as many as 60 percent of the miles you earn today don't even come from flying. You earn them from credit-card charges or other purchases. A $500 credit-card charge usually earns you 500 miles of credit. Yet a transcontinental airline ticket, which often costs as little as $500, will usually yield about 5,000 miles of credit. There's no revenue logic to that discrepancy. The market needs a more rational system with a better and more transparent scrip.

The major alternate carriers--Southwest and its AirTran subsidiary, JetBlue Airways, Virgin America--already have revenue-based frequent-flyer programs. The more you spend with those airlines and their partners, the more points you accrue in their respective frequent-flyer programs. A year from now, at least one and possibly two of the traditional carriers--Delta, United, American, US Airways, Alaska--will have scrapped their decades-old mileage plans and adopted a revenue-based scheme.

This is not conjecture on my part. I've been shown the so-called "earn and burn" structure one carrier may introduce and been informed by another that they will switch next year. The change is coming, and it's coming next year. You can, er, take that to the bank.

Unlike some talking-head experts, whose financial and psychic interests are tied to the frequency status quo, I think a switch to revenue-based programs will be good for genuine, live-their-lives-on-the-road frequent flyers. We spend the most for our airline tickets and are the biggest spenders on the credit cards and other products aligned to our frequency programs. In revenue-based plans, our spending patterns will guarantee we earn the most new scrip and, logically, be the biggest beneficiaries of a reward chart tied the real-time dollar cost of an airline ticket.

I'm much less sanguine about the conversion value of any existing miles you have in your woebegone frequent-flyer bank, however. Some of the models I've been shown are distressing, to say the least. Other models grandfather the existing miles and existing award charts, but the history of grandfathered miles isn't all that good. In fact, American Airlines next month will scrap a pledge to honor its early-iteration AAdvantage miles at their original values. Delta did the same thing in 2006 when it unilaterally merged the remnants of its original frequent-flyer program into its current SkyMiles plan.

History simply isn't on the side of the mileage hoarders. When the points wave starts next year, those with the fewest banked frequent-flyer miles will ultimately be the least financially pained. So cash out now.

There is, however, a problem with cashing out: availability. The airline industry is recording record-high passenger load factors, north of 80 percent for the U.S. carriers. That makes finding desirable seats a challenge. Worse, the route maps of the major carriers are shrinking fast. And the airlines have made it clear that they will continue to shrink their capacity when the "winter" schedules begin at the end of the month. Especially vulnerable: nonstop routes to Europe. That means a lot of high-value, low-mileage-cost, premium-class award seats won't even be flown this winter.

Still, there are two things you can do immediately:

• Pay more attention to award availability on the U.S. carriers' international partners. Frequency programs don't make finding partner awards easy—few of those seats are available to claim online, where most of us look for freebies—but a call to the airlines' frequent-flyer service centers will yield a more complete picture.
• If you have more money and miles than time and frequency expertise, you could use a third-party award concierge. For a fee, they'll help you find and claim the awards to which you are entitled. The best of the lot? Book Your Reward, fronted by Gary Leff, who writes the well-regarded View From the Wing blog.

One final thought: Stop looking at frequent-flyer programs as the entirety of the frequency universe. Hotel frequent-stay plans are very rich, award availability is good, and the lodging plans are already revenue-based schemes. So, when given the option, take hotel points rather than airline miles as we await the transition. And don't ignore American Express Membership Rewards and Chase's new and quite valuable Ultimate Rewards. Both have multiple airline and hotel partners, and you can move points accrued with those schemes freely among the participating companies. It's a good place to accrue—and, yes, bank—your frequency points.