American AAdvantage is stacking a purchased miles bonus with a discount through July 13 that lets you buy miles for ~ 2.14 cents a mile.
I assume the two are combined in order to make it sound more exciting and a little more opaque in terms of doing the math.
Here’s the table showing the discount and bonus that applies at each tier of mileage purchase.
A collection of the most interesting links you’ll want to see, many you’ll want to click.
Business class, to me, is all about the seat. There aren’t many airlines where the food and wine are remarkable, though better business class offerings will be fairly good. Mostly you want personal space to work effectively and to sleep so that you wind up at your destination reasonably rested rather than beaten up.
The best business class experiences make the overall journey seamless, from checkin and security to a lounge to wait for your flight to priority immigration on the other end and even an arrivals lounge for a shower when you land (so you can go straight away to meetings, and because your hotel room may not yet be available with early morning arrivals).
I value my American miles for partner awards, but most members look to redeem American miles on American flights and that’s gotten very hard. It used to be exceptionally easy. Sometime in mid-2012 premium cabin awards to Europe really tightened up. About 18 months ago premium cabin awards to Asia tightened up, and awards to South America did as well.
About a week ago I wrote about American removing saver awards entirely from some domestic markets. Starting a month from now, there were only three days through the end of April where you could find a saver award flying Austin – Dallas. That’s a short, cheap one hour flight where American offers at least 14 flights a day.
Expert Flyer is one of my favorite tools. It has several important uses for frequent flyers — but since September Delta has prevented the site from displaying anything about the airline’s flights.
Fortunately they’ve brought back searches for Delta saver awards, and that means you can use their automated tool to email you when the award seats you want on a given flight open up!
As American retrofits its Boeing 777-200 fleet, their only aircraft that will retain a first class cabin is their Boeing 777-300ERs.
The 777-200s get a good business class seat (similar to American’s 787 business seat), but once reconfigured no longer have a first class cabin.
Effective December 17 American is putting reconfigured 777-200s in for 2 of their 3 New York – London flights, apparently to free up aircraft for Sydney service.
I’ll take a good quality restaurant breakfast (not the standard US airport hotel buffet) over a club lounge, foregoing evening options. But for a mediocre restaurant breakfast I’ll prefer the quick service of the lounge.
There are hotels that offer some amazing breakfast spreads, especially in Asia. If I had to pick one city with the highest average it’s Kuala Lumpur. The best single hotel breakfast I’ve had was probably the St. Regis Bali. And the chain with the best breakfast benefit for top elites is unquestionably Hyatt.
The choice here is ultimately going to be driven by availability, although there are plenty of airlines worth checking given the miles that are available.
Consider that it’s entirely possible to use a different airline for the outbound as the return — not just to try different products, but because schedules and availability may differ, especially for an outbound to North Asia and a return from Southeast Asia.
I’d generally rank the first class products of airlines flying from the US West Coast across the Pacific as follows:
After missing my Virgin Australia flight to Los Angeles and spending the night at the Rydges hotel at the airport, I was re-booked onto Delta’s own Sydney – Los Angeles flight.
I was actually excited to be able to compare Virgin Australia’s 7-across business class to Delta’s four-across. Delta operates the flight with a Boeing 777 fitted with (not reverse) herringbone seats and unfortunately no internet. So not the airline’s best product, but decent enough.
Some people sign up for credit cards in the name of family members (who are willing participants) — they want the bonus miles, but spouse or sibling doesn’t want to deal with meeting minimum spend and doesn’t themselves value the miles.
Things get tricky when it comes time to cancelling, a male voice may have a hard time calling to cancel a woman’s card (so cancel by mail or online). And meeting minimum spend either needs to be done with an authorized user card, or online.
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 »
