Tag Archives for american airlines aadvantage.
I’ve heard from several readers that have had problems changing American Airlines partner awards. They’re told that unless all flights in the itinerary that they want to keep are available with award space at the time they’re making the change, they’re out of luck. They can’t just keep the award flights they have, and change or drop a segment.
American Airlines on the other hand has maintained an 18 month expiration policy. Any activity in the account extends out expiration to 18 months in the future. During the pandemic, with younger leisure travelers making up a disproportionate amount of flying, American updated this to no expiration for members under 21 years old.
Now they’ve offered two further improvements: mileage expiration is now after 24 months of activity and Citi and Barclays co-brand cardmembers won’t have miles expire as long as their accounts are open.
When American Airlines ran a holiday promotion in conjunction with Mastercard on their joint venture SimplyMiles website, I went all-in. They offered sextuple miles on all offers, and the most lucrative was unlimited 40 miles per dollar donating to Conservation International – a charity Mastercard was raising money for.
That meant earning 240 miles per dollar, or buying miles at $0.0042 apiece. I did 7 million miles. That’s hardly ‘the most’ anyone went for. I know of several readers who did more than me. One reported earning 12 million miles with this promotion.
Congratulations to everyone who got in on this deal. It’s hard to overstate just how incredible this offer was. And kudos to American Airlines and Mastercard for honoring the offer made to customers even if it might have been considered “too good to be true.”
American Airlines is known for being particularly stingy with international business class award space on its own flights. I redeem AAdvantage miles more than any other airline currency, but almost always for flights on their partners. So when there’s good space for valuable awards on American Airlines itself, I try to highlight it.
The AAdvantage program is the annuity that’s been driving free cash at the airline for years. They’d be wise not to kill the goose, and the odds they’re good enough to extract even more value out of it for themselves without killing it seem less than 20%.
Based on an interview with Chief Revenue Officer Vasu Raja, changes to American AAdvantage seem likely to shift away from frequency and more towards revenue (remember – United awards elite status on spending and not miles flown) and to reward buying up to Main Cabin Extra or first class more than the program does today.
American AAdvantage has a 40th anniversary promotion which runs June 7 through July 17 where AAdvantage members with co-brand credit cards issued by Santander Bank earn about 5 miles per dollar. This is one of the richest credit card promotions I have seen, ever, at least that wasn’t based on a mistake of sorts.
The President of the American AAdvantage program says they’re intending to get rid of award charts. He offered that they’re working on a replacement like “a real estate website that shows you how many people have bought a property in a given area and for what price range, as well as a ticker for how many people are looking at a specific property right now.”
The more I think about this model, and this analogy that he offers, the worse it sounds for customers.
The President of the American AAdvantage program says they’re working on something to replace award charts. He says has ‘no plans to devalue’ which means, of course, that he’s planning to devalue the program but not call it a devaluation. How do we know this?
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 »
