American Airlines Partners Have Gutted The Ability To Redeem AAdvantage Miles
While American Airlines hasn’t made changes to its partner award pricing – yet, they’re warning they will! – those awards, which are the best part of the AAdvantage program, have become far less valuable. Almost across the board their partners have been restricting the ability of AAdvantage members to redeem their miles.
American Airlines has vowed to shake up partner award pricing which hasn’t been changed since October 2016. It’s precisely because we haven’t seen changes to partner awards in over 7 years that this has remained the sweet spot of value for AAdvantage.
The airline has eliminated Saver and AAnytime pricing for its own flights and along with that has come a stealth devaluation – so much so that if you want to travel on American Airlines, it’s cheaper to redeem miles in a partner airline’s program to do so, rather than American’s own miles.
- Avios programs release plenty of award seats, but are now reserving those for their own members. British Airways – American’s primary partner! – was first to begin restricting availability of award seats to AAdvantage (and to Alaska Airlines). They make seats available when flight schedules are released but those are now only for redemption of Avios from BA or another Avios airline.
British Airways Business Class - This has been spreading. Qatar Airways is an Avios program and can book those BA seats. Now we’re seeing awards released on Qatar that are only booking with Avios, like Qatar’s new Miami flight. I’d expect then that with Finnair’s adoption of Avios and commitment of award seats we’ll see the same thing.
Qatar Airways Al Safwa First Class Lounge - No more Etihad premium cabin awards over 30 days in advance. Etihad now restricts partner award availability to within 30 days of flight for business and first class redemptions.
Etihad First Apartment Cabin, Airbus A380 - Qantas now restricts awards to its own members. A post-pandemic phenomenon seems to be extensive award availability that’s frequently only for members using Qantas Frequent Flyer points and not partner points. Qantas long haul business class awards were always hard to get. Now they’re even harder to get with American’s miles than before, despite their joint venture with American.
Qantas First Class Lounge Sydney - Other partners have gotten tougher for award space. Japan Airlines no longer releases seats as reliably on schedule. Cathey Pacific releases far less space than it used to.
Cathay Pacific First Class
And as partner awards have gotten harder to book, even as pricing hasn’t changed, American’s own best awards have become frequently unreasonably exorbitant. For instance, I surveyed American’s Los Angeles – Sydney flight and found that business class awards from April through end of schedule were never pricing below 391,500 miles one way (from my home city of Austin the lowest was 450,000 miles). Just a few weeks ago there were still some dates where 100,000 mile awards were possible.
Every day from April through end of schedule, the minimum price @AmericanAir is charging for a business class seat Los Angeles to Sydney is 391,500 miles.
The. Minimum. (Lowest from Austin is 450k one way per person.)
Thanks, AA! pic.twitter.com/0lHelEcxTI
— gary leff (@garyleff) February 21, 2024
I was considering a date change to an existing American Airlines Australia roundtrip for my family of three, but that’s clearly not going to be possible.
