Via Milepoint, United isn’t the only one making changes to its award chart.

The South African Airways Voyager Program will see some pretty steep increases in award prices effective April 15.

Of course, there’s a formula to these announcements. They always begin with some modest improvement. In this case it’s improvements in mileage earning on some discount fares within South Africa, and to Addis Ababa, Dakar, Accra, Douala, and Lagos. Woo hoo! (Ok, I guess this is good for short-haul South African Airways flyers, though by definition short-haul means that the full earning won’t amount to a whole lot of incremental miles earned on each flight.)

Then the hammer drops:

Below is an advance look at the SAA Award Chart revisions and on average, the following can be expected in our new SAA Award Chart:
• MileageKeeper Awards will increase by 6%
  
• AnyDay Awards for Domestic and Regional flights will increase on average by 14%
  
• AnyDay Awards for International flights will increase between 11% to 28%
  
• Upgrade Awards will increase by approximately 14%, 12% and 35% for Domestic, Regional and International respectively
  
• Accra and Dakar have been added to the region “Travel between Southern Africa and Africa 2”

They’ll also add additional coach seats on South African metal for additional miles, but fewer seats and fewer miles than ‘rulebuster’ any seat-style awards. It remains to be seen whether more seats get pushed into the additional mileage availability bucket or if this is truly just another option.