Tag Archives for american aadvantage.
American Airlines is expected to eliminate the “close in booking fee” on awards, the $75 per ticket charge for booking award travel within 21 days of departure (which is currently waived for AAdvantage elite frequent flyers using miles from their own account).
For program members as a whole eliminating close-in booking fees will be a good thing though the underlying program changes that lead the fee to no longer make sense are a negative overall.
Citibank should be notifying its customers today of benefits changes that go into effect May 1 for the Citi® / AAdvantage® Platinum Select® card. One is a modest positive, while the other will be disappointing to many.
Last summer Citi adjusted the benefit of their primary AAdvantage consumer card, adding two new bonus categories for spending and introducing the ability to earn a discount on American Airlines travel through card spend. So I’ve been waiting to see what sort of updates would be coming to the Barclays AAdvantage cards. There are several changes that go into effect May 1.
JonNYC tweets about American considering a change to their systemwide upgrades that are provided to Executive Platinum and ConciergeKey members: that they would only be usable by the member themselves (and presumably other passengers on the same reservation) and could no longer be gifted to family or friends. American says no such change is imminent.
This would be all about breakage, making upgrades cheaper to offer because more of them would go unused if they cannot be given away. And by the way they’d be taking away benefits and scaling back costs at the same time they are requiring more revenue from a customer to earn these in the first place.
Several weeks ago I wrote that Qatar Airways will sell access to their incredible Al Safwa first class lounge in Doha for just $69. It turns out this is being offered to passengers on awards, too.
For a long time American AAdvantage has offered status ‘challenges’ that do not require you to already have status with another airline and that you pay for. These allow you to earn elite status more quickly with travel over a compressed period of time.
American started requiring minimum spend as part of these challenges, and is expected to increase the spend required — so if you’re interested in a status challenge you may want to request it sooner than later.
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 »
