Tag Archives for award chart.
Alaska separately introduced their partnership with oneworld member Qatar Airways, and at the start of June said that award redemption on Qatar would become available in August. They’re actually a few days early, and Qatar Airways awards are currently bookable on the Alaska Airlines website. However the prices are.. sketchy to say the least.
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.
Hyatt is out with its new summer promotion offering triple points on all stays of two nights or more, and they’ve announced they’re delaying the ‘high and low season redemption’ award chart devaluation by about three and a half more months. They’re also extending the pause on points expiration.
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?
Award charts are the fundamental cornerstone of a loyalty value proposition.. Always and everywhere that a frequent flyer program has dropped award charts it has meant big devaluations. There are no exceptions.
The good news is Boston and New York – Madrid remain 34,000 miles each way in business class. Iberia Plus is a transfer partner of both Chase and American Express, and members with Iberia Plus accounts with activity can move their British Airways points over. This can be desirable because Iberia’s transatlantic awards on their own planes are so inexpensive and fuel surcharges aren’t significant.
Back in the fall Hyatt announced 15 hotels that would change redemption category but otherwise declared they would ‘suspend 2021 hotel category changes’.
That didn’t turn out to hold.
When Air Canada relaunched the Aeroplan frequent flyer program – an American Express transfer partner, and soon to have a Chase co-brand credit card, so highly relevant to Americans – they committed to an award chart.
Right now though partner award pricing isn’t sticking to the chart. That means some awards are pricing higher than they should, and others are pricing for fewer miles.
At the beginning of February Delta devalued SkyMiles partner award pricing for the second time during the pandemic, and in a big way. Since the start of Covid-19 one way business class between the US and Europe on Air France and KLM went from 75,000 to 95,000 miles and now starts at 120,000 SkyMiles – for a 60% increase in less than a year at a time when flights are empty and prices low. Because they can.
Delta says they have no award charts any longer, but that isn’t true. They just hide their award charts. Mexico is a separate region from the United States, and while they’ve massively increased their award chart pricing for partner travel to and from the U.S., they haven’t (yet) done so for travel to and from Mexico.
Alaska Airlines will become the second U.S. airline in the global oneworld alliance, along with American Airlines, effective March 31. But it turns out Alaska Airlines miles will not be redeemable on oneworld airlines that haven’t already been partners in the Mileage Plan program at that time. Instead mileage redemption on new partners in oneworld will have to wait until summer.
In other words Alaska Airlines has rushed the work to join oneworld, and will actually join before it’s done. This means customers will be able to earn miles on new airlines, crediting to their Mileage Plan account – and more airlines will award airlines for travel on Alaska – but customers don’t gain access to spend those miles on more airlines for a few more months.
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 »
