Tag: AAdvantage

American AAdvantage Changes

ssegraves

aa_eliteIf you haven’t seen the news, American Airlines announced changes to their frequent flyer program, AAdvantage. Most notably, and least surprising, is the fact that they are moving to a spend requirement for elite status in 2017. They are also adding a new elite level, Platinum Pro, one level above Platinum. It is equivalent to United’s Platinum status and requires 75k miles or 90 segments and $9,000 in spend.

I am not an American flyer, but Seth has a pretty great write-up on the changes.

There is virtually no creativity in the changes. Not that I was really expecting any, but I had a sliver of hope that things would be different in one way or another. Upgrades for top-tier elites on award tickets is probably the closest thing to that in my book, and that’s a nice nod to those customers, but the overall changes really are boring.

I have to agree. There is not a lot of anything special in the announcement and American seems to just be following in the footsteps of Delta and United.

American Airlines Releases New Award Chart

ssegraves

Seth has details of the changes. The big changes are in the AAnytime Awards, or awards that have more availability across dates. There are now three tiers of AAnytime Awards with the highest tier being exponentially more expensive than the lower tier. US Airways also upped the price of the sweet spot on their reward chart, US-North Asia rewards go from 90,000 miles to 110,000 miles.

The biggest news out of this seems to be American releasing the chart with no announcement and making the changes effective immediately. That is definitely not the most customer friendly way to do business and is different than the announcement from other airlines regarding similar types of changes.

I think this is the beginning of the end of the American Airlines love affair that a lot of travel/airline bloggers seem to have. American is going to start to fall in line with what the other carriers have in place for elite programs and reward bookings and people need to prepare themselves for that.