The American-US Airways Merger Will Close on Monday Morning: How Will That Affect Your Travel?

Monday morning the merger between American Airlines and US Airways is expected to close.

This much may be obvious to some, but no to others, and this site attracts many any readers of all backgrounds and experience so it seemed worthy of a mention.

While the news will report that American Airlines and US Airways have merged, for all intents and purposes that changes absolutely nothing in terms of immediate travel, and travel through the holidays.

American and US Airways continue to operate as separate airlines and there’s not even any relationship between the two yet for the flying public.

For the next month you will not even be able to earn American miles when flying US Airways (or vice versa).

So if you have reservations to fly US Airways, continue to check in with US Airways and use the US Airways website. You will be flying US Airways and the US Airways frequent flyer program and partnerships prevail.

Similarly if you’re flying American, continue to check-in with American.

Even if you’re flying between Dallas and Charlotte or Dallas and Philadelphia, there’s no special relationship yet — if you want to switch from an American flight on the route over to a US Airways flight or vice versa, it would be no different than changing airlines from one to any other.

Now, come January 7 we expect some measure of frequent flyer relationship to develop between the two — at least earning miles back and forth, probably redeeming miles as well, and possibly some measure of elite status recognition (whether just priority check-in and boarding, or some measure of upgrade reciprocity is not yet known). This will have an impact on frequent flyers.

At the end of March US Airways should leave Star Alliance and shortly thereafter join oneworld. Those changes will have meaning for how you earn and redeem miles on partners.

I would guess that the two airlines do not combine and begin flying as a single carrier until early 2015 — if I had to pin a date it would be over the first weekend of March 2015.

So we’re a long way off from seeing significant change, even though the two airlines should officially ‘merge’ on Monday.


About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Any predictions on when US/UA codeshares (sometimes US tickets for UA flights can be much cheaper, and occasionally vice versa) or simply being able to buy a US flight (or redeem UA miles for) on the UA site will end?

  2. lets hope for the best for us mileage junkies, and be able to book star alliance tickets with AA miles online, not the hokey system AA has in place now.

  3. You wouldn’t be able to buy star alliance tickets with AA because they will be moving over to OneWorld

  4. @bri

    I hope they revamp the AA online booking system so we can book trips to s.e. asian without calling in.

    Maybe they could take a lesson from the United site.

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