US Airways Dividend Miles as merged into American AAdvantage back in March. But did you know that your US Airways Dividend Miles number still works? In fact you can even still enter it for American Airlines flights and receive credit. If you’ve included it on existing bookings into the future that apparently is fine. However you’ll only be able to enter it on bookings for the next week.

Here’s the detail of the end of using US Airways Dividend Miles numbers, from AASalesLink:

Nonetheless, both the US Airways airline and the Dividend Miles frequent flyer program were retired in 2015.

US Airways systems weren’t very automated, and rules and procedures aren’t constraints as a result. That was always ‘interesting’ booking award tickets. That’s gone now, since all awards are handled out of American AAdvantage and the American systems.

Back in the day though it meant:

• No automatically-enforced routing restrictions. I might have seen or even booked flights between South American and the US via Australia, Asia and Europe with more than one stopover.

• No auto-pricing of awards. Agents had to pick how much an award cost, which means they needed to understand what countries were in what regions. In most cases they didn’t actually look this up. The most common result is ‘South Asia’ awards like Thailand pricing at ‘North Asia’ prices.

• Ability to make changes, even after departure of first segment, and ability to avoid change fees. Any change incurred fees under US Airways Dividend Miles rules and you weren’t ever supposed to be able to make a change after award travel started. But if you hung up and called back enough times… On the other hand it also meant that some agents thought any changes would mean cancelling an entire award and starting over.

But the US Airways system wasn’t just advantageous for awards. Personally I’ve always been a fan especially during irregular operations. I’d rebook coach passengers in first class, if that’s what was available (even finding flights to request where only first was available). Or rebook on other airlines.

If one agent didn’t give you what you wanted? No worries. Hang Up, Call Back: The Four Most Important Words in Travel, and Maybe Even in Life

Losing US Airways meant losing access to awards on Star Alliance partners. Net net I prefer the inflight products of American’s partners (though opinions vary) but clearly there are more airlines and better overall award availability through Star. It did mean gaining one-way awards at half the price of roundtrip, though, something that US Airways didn’t have.

With the end of using US Airways Dividend Miles numbers near, we’ll even begin to lose our memories of Dividend Miles. But that candle still burns bright in some quarters.