American Airlines should do more merchandising. They should be selling more bundles. They should be packaging access to their status program, which wouldn’t just raise revenue it would also introduce more people to the benefits and get them on the hamster wheel – bought into the AAdvantage ecosystem.
Part of how you turn a money-losing flying operation into one that makes money is to figure out the offers and add-ons that your customers want, and give them the opportunity to pay for them.
So I was naturally inclined to like what American was doing with their new AAdvantage Pass™… until I saw the price. The airline now sells a package consisting of:
- 100,000 miles
- AAdvantage Gold status
- 15,000 Loyalty points
They were just selling miles for Black Friday at less than 1.9 cents apiece. They used to sell at that price regularly (and the miles were worth a bit more). I’d value the 100,000 miles at $1,300 – $1,500 but today’s price to buy 100,000 miles is $2,633.75.
This package’s cost? $5,000.00. The airline tells me,
Members can also gift the AAdvantage Pass™ — a great way to elevate travel for yourself or someone else ahead of the busy holiday season.
I don’t know. I’m not planning on giving any $5,000 Christmas gifts. But if I were thinking about how to best spend $5,000 on a loved one I’m not sure it would be this?
And the $5,000 doesn’t even come with the 40,000 Loyalty Points needed for Gold, so that it’s a real head start towards higher status. You only get 15,000 Loyalty Points!
The airline is overreaching here. Hopefully they’re learning. Maybe they’ll prove me wrong, and there are more buyers at the $5,000 price point than I think there are. I couldn’t recommend this at that price! If it doesn’t work, perhaps we’ll see a lower price or a shift in how it’s marketed.
It seems to me ‘buy 100,000 miles at regular $3,750 price and we’ll give you enough Loyalty Points for Gold status’ could be a compelling offer for some. It’s a great ‘AAdvantage starter pack’. It might generate more sales, and so be far more profitable for the airline, since a mile costs them about three-quarters of a cent.
$5,000 for this is just too much, and only 15,000 Loyalty Points is just too little. But dipping their toes into bundling and monetizing status is actually a good thing for the airline to do.
I am so glad that after 40 years as EXP/CK I abandoned this loser airline for Flying Blue.
Loser AAirline.
At a minimum, for this price there needs to be enough loyalty points for platinum level.
After getting many crazy offers from AA over the years, I assume their internal objective is to simply pick off a few crazy folks who have no concept of value. They can’t really expect to get many takers?
When you’ve lost @Woofie for the French/Dutch, maybe you done f’d up.
$5,000 for entry-level Gold. Wow, maybe @Tim Dunn was right and AAL is going under.
3M on AA, mostly expat, some CK, and dumped it 12 years ago. It was a good call.
Free agent, paid first….it works
Yuck, since I only fly F/J, gold gives me almost nothing. I already have 350,000 miles with them that I can never use for international J. The only time I could snag an Australian trip in J for reasonable miles was for a flight in December 2020, and we know why that never happened. So, I end up using my miles for F on my one domestic flight a year. By the time I’d get to the 100,000 in this offer, they’d probably be worth maybe one or two grand. Through in lounge access and it still is a non-starter.
I got Frontier Gold status for 19 months for $40. Beat that, AA.
Unless the point is to make it so expensive that the customer feels as if he needs to use it to justify the sunk cost?
@This comes to mind — I admire your F/J-only lifestyle, and am sad to hear Oz December 2020 didn’t work out; did you at least make it there since then? Many of us had trips that never happened during the pandemic. It’s taken a while to finally make some happen since. Worthwhile when you can.
Has AA come up with anything worthwhile in loyalty over the past few years?
They are good at credit cards and bad at loyalty.
If I wanted 100,000 AA miles, I’d just use Gary’s link for the Citi Strata Elite! (Ba-dum-tshh)
@L737 — Zing!
I had some major purchases this year and decided to try to reverse uno Delta out of one of their hubs. I got to AA Gold and thought surely, flying out of a Delta hub I would get upgraded. Hahaha. I was #35 on the upgrade list. Then I thought, well, I’ll book on a partner airline. Hahaha. Near impossible to find a Qantas or JAL or similar that doesn’t take 2 legs of positioning flights to get there. Then I thought, I’ll burn my points on award tickets and pay to upgrade a level like I do on Delta. Nope. No upgrades on award tickets. Surely this new OneWorld Ruby has lounge access. Nope. Then I found out that all the airlines I wanted to fly in one world were transfer partners of my existing Capital 1 account. So, I’ll burn out my AA points where appropriate and enjoy whatever happens thru Feb 2027, but I’m back to Capital 1 transfers to Flying Blue and flying on Delta metal again. It was worth seeing but not impressed with the outcome.
@BookGirl305 — Hold up, what’s a ‘reverse uno Delta’? Is that just like flying DL from MIA instead of AA? Yikes, otherwise, what a parade of horribles you’ve been through.
Ummmm. Stupid program. If you want 100k miles by just spending a lot of money, just get the executive card and spend $5,000 at aa hotels. You’ll get 50k miles just for the purchase with the 10x multiplier. And you should have no problem at all getting 50k miles for the hotel stays. You’ll end up with 100k+ miles and 50k+ loyalty. Plus now you have a few weeks in hotels and lounge access.
@Gary – I think this is actually positioned as an alternative to their usual end-of-year buy-up your status shenanigans. Can’t be too generous, or we can’t get those suckers to upgrade from Gold to Plat for $6k to get them 2000 loyalty points!
I can’t imagine they sell many of those every year, but I bet some exec had a brain wave and decided not to cannibalize those sales.
Unless you have an upcoming trip and need miles, it’s a terrible idea to buy miles. In fact, I would jump at an offer if they seize 1/3 of your miles but guarantee an award chart for you.
Let me guess…you don’t even get the increased miles per dollar on AA purchases if you buy this with a Citi or Barclay AA card…
At least that could add another 20k miles and 5k loyalty points on the purchase.
@jamesb2147 – I expect that closer to the status year-end (which isn’t until February for AA) we will see buy ups/buy backs. They generate eight figures from that.
$5K for Gold status, which gets you nothing….I am so glad I walked away from AA and ExPlat after many years. I used to root for this airline’s hopeful turnaround. Not AAnymore.
Several of these comments have similar structure, rhetoric, and style. Either few of you have original thoughts or this is the same wave of United Airlines Internet Task Force that has been popping up over the last year on various other sites as well. They flock whenever Delta, American, or Alaska are mentioned. Peculiar.
@Steve – yep. This is silly. I’m a big AA Exec x AA Hotels fan, which is the best way to replicate the entire package.
But if you just want the status, I mean, ProFlowers is at 20x miles on AA eshopping today. You need 39,000 LP for Gold (everyone gets a free 1k LP at 15k LPs). So go buy $1,950 of flowers – bam, you’re Gold, you have 39k miles and 40k LPs, and actually have a pathway to Platinum/OWS which the “Pass” does not provide (which is where there actually starts to be value).
Or, you know, travel. Starting from scratch you get 5x miles, so that’s $7800 for Gold for 39k LPs/miles, and you get to travel. With a $0 mileup card, it’s $6500. With a JAL multi-city business class ticket in March that’s around $5k from JFK to Taipei with as long of a “stopover” on the way back as you would like in Tokyo, based on the mileage flown, you’ll get Gold (go on a mileage run and see the world in JAL business class on an A350!).
Just so many better ways here to achieve status and earn miles. Including now with Citi that transfers to AA. La dee da.
Buying miles does NOT give you status BTW. You can only ear that by flying or using the card. Check before you do that.
What does Gold really provide? Maybe an open MCE seat (likely a middle one) at check in and a once in the blue moon upgrade?
@cathy – buying miles through AA does not. But base miles come with LPs. And you can get 20x base miles per $1 at proflowers with AA eshopping portal. Or as @steve suggested you can get outsized base miles for booking with AA hotels (the 10x miles on spend with AA executive is 1x base 9x bonus miles). So your statement that you can only earn status by flying or using the card is simply not accurate.