Tag Archives for loyalty points.
Virgin Atlantic was the first airline to offer elite status credit when redeeming miles. Delta, which owns 49% of Virgin, copied them. And then United followed. Now American Airlines appears to be testing something similar.
For the upcoming member year (March 2024 – February 2025) there is no change to the number of Loyalty Points required to earn status, and no change to the number of Loyalty Points required to earn choice benefits.
There are, however, changes to the choice benefits.
Since credit card spending is so important for driving elite status, American Airlines is letting customers know that they’ve changed how that spend is counted towards status.
Sometime over the past day, the Rocketmiles hotel booking website has seen it’s AAdvantage mileage-earning chopped by several orders of magnitude. Hotels that might earn 10,000 or more miles (and status-qualifying Loyalty Points) per night are now earning 200 or 300 miles. This is a strange development, but it does not appear to be a mistake.
American Airlines is making several changes to status-earning and adding milestones at which you’ll receive additional benefits for 2023.
They’re also removing the flight requirement to earn milestone benefits; increasing the Loyalty Points required for Gold status, while leaving all other levels the same; lifting the cap on the number of miles you can earn for a ticket; and changing mileage-earning on basic economy tickets. It’s also going to take more Loyalty Points to earn choice benefits for Platinum Pro and Executive Platinum members.
Citibank is surveying potential changes to its premium American AAdvantage credit card which comes with Admirals Club lounge membership. Generally they appear to be looking to raise the card’s $450 annual fee, and begin charging for authorized user cards (since those cards also grant lounge access). In the surveys I shared they’re playing around with partner offers – such as statement credits from Hyatt, Lyft, Avis, and DoorDash – to see whether those help them raise the card’s annual fee even higher.
Buried in the notes about benefits the card would offer for additional Loyalty Points after $40,000 and $90,000 spend in a year is a reference to a higher number of Loyalty Points associated with American Airlines Gold and Platinum status.
It’s much, much easier to earn status when you already have status with American. If you were flying to earn status and not engaging in any other activity, it would take $18,182 for an existing Executive Platinum member to re-earn Executive Platinum. In contrast, someone starting with no status and earning Executive Platinum on flying alone would need to spend $27,012 on tickets. But you don’t have to start fresh.
At an internal employee meeting earlier in the month, a recording of which was reviewed by View From The Wing, Chief Commercial Offer Vasu Raja shared that Advantage enrollments in New York are outpacing nearly every other market in the system., and that more people are qualifying for status in New York than before “and 65% are doing it on the card.”
There are several rebates and bonus offers available right now for Uber and Uber Eats, that you can stack for lower costs, points, and to earn American Airlines elite status all at the same time if you sign up for the offers and use the right credit cards. In fact there’s a triple-dipping opportunity.
At the start of April I wrote about an offer to earn 465 American AAdvantage miles – and elite status miles – per Uber trip up to 4 times via SimplyMiles. That’s 1,860 elite status miles for taking Uber and charging the trip to a Mastercard registered on the SimplyMiles site by May 31, 2022.
I now see that I have two other Uber offers as well, which I’ve now activated.
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 »
