ANA Mileage Club has announced an award chart devaluation effective with bookings made starting April 18, 2024. It’s been a a decade since they made any changes to award prices, which is why the program’s awards have cost so many fewer miles than competitors. For instance you’ve been able to book,
- Star Alliance business class to Europe for just 88,000 miles roundtrip
- Star Alliance business class to Australia for just 120,000 miles roundtrip
Both awards on ANA and on Star Alliance airlines are going up. The new pricing is reasonable compared to competitors, but takes away some of ANA’s edge. For instance,
- US-Japan in business class currently runs 75,000 to 90,000 miles roundtrip on ANA and will be going up to 100,000 to 110,000. Again, that’s roundtip, which is great! But it’s still as much as a one-third increase.
- Star Alliance business to Europe goes to 100,000 points roundtrip.
ANA Mileage Club was always better in theory than in practice. Among the major transferrable bank currencies, they only partnered with American Express Membership Rewards. You couldn’t put awards on hold, and transfers take 24-72 hours depending on when the transfer is initiated.
So find award space, transfer points, and the space may be gone by the time that you can book it. That means you need to keep points in your ANA account in order to jump on opportunities. But ANA miles expire after 36 months, and cannot be extended in most cases.
Awards are only available roundtrip (though there are workarounds to reduce the cost when booking one-way) and ANA awards incur fuel surcharges (though not on a few partners, such as for United flights).
ANA First Class Champagne
ANA First Class Meal
ANA still offers savings compared to other programs, but with reduced savings you really need to calculate the value against fuel surcharges (compared to, say, booking through Aeroplan). ANA is still going to be great for booking United Airlines roundtrip business class! But you probably won’t consider using them to book Lufthansa.
Post pandemic, especially with the current restriction on flying over Russian airspace, even one-way saver awards in premium cabins on transpacific flights are hard to come by, so it’s nearly impossible to book such awards roundtrip. As a result, I’ve only used NH miles once since the pandemic. I was hoping those opportunities would return as things eventually return to normal, but that won’t be the case now with this massive devaluation.
ANA is just doing what many other airlines have done with their programs in devaluing their scheme. Monkey see….
at least release more award like cathy
Yeah the delay posting, lack of one ways and expiration has always prevented me from utilizing.
Gary – Any word on whether ANA plans to increase redemption rates for RTW awards too?
Truthfully, this was long overdue. While unrealistically low redemptions are always great from a customer perspective, they aren’t a sustainable business model. That being said, rather than doing occasional massive devaluations, airlines should be doing minor annual adjustments. It’s hard to be mad at 100k round trip to Japan though, even if the old deal was much better.
ANA cannot compare to BR, OZ, SQ of Star Alliance, CX of oneworld, and VN of SkyTeam. It would lose in all areas: quality of food, politeness and hospitality service, lounges, airport service and check-in process. If UA codeshares and collaborates more with SQ, BR, OX, noone would fly NH.
I am so done with ANA. A few years ago I transferred 200000 Amex points to ANA between me and my wife. I wanted to take advantage of their bargain points pricing on getting to Asia. I have been trying during all that time to get two Biz Class seats to Asia with multiple bookings made months in advance. ANA allows that and gets you ‘waitlisted’ which sounds pretty good when booking nine months in advance. Dozens of bookings have all died on the vine. I had two bookings that I was able to get space on one leg but because ANA only allows RT awards those died too.
Unlike most other carriers, ANA has a strict restriction on points expiration. There’s no way to extend them. Our 200,000 points were due to expire at the end of this month and I thought all was lost. But yesterday I was looking around on their clunky website and found that you can burn 12k ANA points in exchange for a $100 Amazon gift card. So I did just that 18 times which should result (haven’t seen them yet) in $1800 in Amazon spend. Certainly not the best usage of points but better than letting them expire.
ANA is good for UA J awards? UA is last on my airline list, and since they did away with all their saver awards, how would you book them???