American Airlines Converted Flight Credits Into Trip Credits: What You Need To Know

by Gary Leff

Over the summer I wrote a guide to the mind-numbingly complicated differences between an American Airlines trip credit, travel voucher, flight credit and gift card, including a helpful internal grid that the carrier’s employees use:

American has been replacing paper vouchers with ‘trip credits’ which allow payment towards an adult passenger fare on American and American Airlines codeshares only. These can be used as partial payment towards a ticket (topped off with a credit card) or partially used towards full payment of a ticket, with residual amounts emailed to the passenger. Trip credits can also be used to book yourself an extra seat.

Eventually they will become combinable with other forms of payments (eVouchers, gift cards, flight discounts and towards award ticket taxes and fees), for multiple passengers in the same booking and for multiple passenger types.

American Airlines has now converted many old ‘flight credits’ into ‘trip credits’. Update: it’s been pointed out to me I should underscore that this process isn’t complete and won’t be for awhile.

These credits have been rolled out not quite ready for prime time. They don’t have full functionality. They can’t even be used for international tickets yet, which seems sort of insane. Eventually they should work as intended, however.

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. @ Gary — Yeah, I can confirm that mine have NOT been converted. I really hope this happens without me having to waste my time intervening.

  3. Still a total slog. Chat feature got miles reinstated after an hour with helpful rep. Had a trip credit in system with no value attached.

  4. Mine have NOT been converted either. I sent an email to AA specifically asking about what , when and how this will be happening. Hoping to get a helpful response.

  5. After 3 hour wait to talk to rep, was told yesterday (November 19, 2022) that only top tier elites were having flight credits converted to trip credits. And no way rep could convert my husband’s 3 flight credits totaling almost $1200 to trip credits. All expire March 31, 2022, and was told travel has to be completed by that date.

  6. My flight credit was converted to trip credit and I am only Gold. My son’s was converted too and he has no status

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