Big Changes Ahead: American Airlines Vows To Shake Up Partner Rewards
During the American Airlines fourth quarter earnings call, Chief Commercial Officer Vasu Raja said that customers would soon earn miles differently whether they book directly with American versus through a third party.
I had shared that this was coming a month ago, and also noted several other changes that were in the works that weren’t announced as part of 2024 program upgrades.
One of those is changes is redemption price changes for partner awards. American eliminated their ‘saver’ and ‘anytime’ award charts last year for flights on their own aircraft. Basically that means all of their awards for travel solely on American are now dynamically priced (what used to be called web specials). They did publish an award chart showing ‘starting at’ pricing but actual prices don’t seem to be reflected by that chart at all.
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At the time they did not make any changes to how partner awards (and awards that include both American Airlines and partner airlines) work at all. That requires changes to contracts with their airline partners.
Raja shared last month on the American Airlines employee podcast that “We’re going to make redemption cheaper and higher volume.. than ever before, not just on us but on our partners.” This sounded like he’s saying partner redemption will follow the model they’ve laid out for American Airlines award travel pricing.
While this wasn’t included in the 2024 program change announcement, there’s no reason it has to be. That was an update to how status and benefits work, and American might make changes to redemption at any time.
Vasu Raja doubled down on saying that partner price changes are coming in his presentation to employees at the airline’s “State of the Union” following its fourth quarter earnings call this past week, a recording of which was reviewed by View From The Wing.
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He explained that not only are oneworld alliance upgrades coming to the AAdvantage program, but partner award pricing is coming as well.
We’re going to make it really easy for people to become our best customers by giving more miles when they go shop with us directly. We’re going to make it more rewarding to become our customer. Miles will go farther. We are able to go do things where people are able to get upgrades on other partners, redemption at a level that they’ve never seen before which will make it more attractive.
We don’t know when these changes or coming, or what exactly they will look like, but Raja’s December mention of partner award pricing changes was clearly not an aberration. He frames this as a positive for customers, but that’s no different than the framing on changes to pricing of American’s awards for their own flights and those haven’t been better for customers. It’s now a lot cheaper to redeem travel on American Airlines using miles from partner airlines rather than using American’s own miles.
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The best value in the AAdvantage program is using miles to travel on partner airlines in premium cabins. Business class to Europe is 57,500 miles each way, Japan 60,000, and India and the Maldives 70,000. Changes here are unlikely to be positive.
