In December 2019 – shortly before the start of the pandemic – Korean Air announced a huge devaluation of their frequent flyer program with revenue-based mileage-earning and a new distance-based award chart coming in April 2021.

Korean Air has offered one of the more lucrative frequent flyer programs for many years, and access to outstanding award inventory not made available to its partners. They used to be a Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer partner, and before that relationship ended I transferred hundreds of thousands of points into my own SkyPass account.

However they’re also part of a joint venture with (and partially owned by) Delta, so devaluation of their mileage program was almost a given. Under planned changes the price of a business class award from New York to Singapore would have doubled while the cost of short-distance coach redemptions would have gone down.

		Coach		Business		First		Upgrade
Domestic S. Korea		5,000		10,000		15,000		5,000
Less Thank 500 mi		10,000		20,000		30,000		10,000
500 – 999		12,500		25,000		37,500		12,500
1000 – 1499		15,000		30,000		45,000		15,000
1500 – 1999		17,500		35,000		52,500		22,500
2000 – 2999		22,500		45,000		67,500		30,000
3000 – 3999		27,500		55,000		82,500		37,500
4000 – 4999		32,500		65,000		97,500		45,000
5000 – 6499		40,000		80,000		120,000		55,000
6500 – 9999		45,000		90,000		135,000		62,500
10,000+		60,000		120,000		180,000		85,000

High season redemptions come at a 50% premium to the distance-based chart above.

The partner award chart will become more expensive as well. Flights will be priced one way, with slightly higher mileage pricing for travel on partners than on Korean (ranging from an extra 1000 miles for the shortest coach flights to an extra 15,000 miles for the longest first class flights).

Fly With Moxie reports on local Korean media sharing the airline plans to delay their devaluation. The reason given is that members haven’t been able to use their miles for international travel during the time between the announcement and when changes were scheduled to go into effect.

It’s unclear when the airline plans to make this announcement, or how far out the devaluation will be rescheduled – hopefully indefinitely. Update: Korean Air will postpone their devaluation by two years, until April 2023.