Tag: MileagePlus

What is happening with United reward prices?

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From Live and Let’s Fly:

As flagged by Chazza in a comment on Live And Let’s Fly, Lufthansa redemption rates have risen from 121K to 154K one-way between the USA and Europe. Even more alarmingly, ANA redemption rates have risen from 121K to 242K one-way between the US and Japan, a devaluation of 100%. The change was effective April 24, 2024.

While initial searches Seats.Aero suggested some differences in pricing, it is now clear that all prices have risen for both transpacific and transatlantic first class awards.

The whole post is worth a read but the gist is that it seems United has made some award price changes, in some cases a 100% increase in the number of miles needed for a long haul first class award. There have also been other reports of coach award prices on partners going up as well. In addition to this, the above linked post mentions there are dates with the lower prices still available and that’s what I have been seeing as well. This leads me to think that this is actually dynamic pricing being tweaked or fully implemented for partners.

I don’t love these higher numbers but with the peddling of credit cards around every corner and every “influencer” sharing how they got a crazy expensive vacation on points these higher prices were bound to happen. If you are a frequent traveler and look for rewards you may have noticed that it’s harder to find premium space, specifically business class, on a lot of long haul routes. With so many credit cards being marketed to people and the number of points in people’s accounts going up, the airlines are sort of forced to raise reward prices to try and remove those new outstanding miles from their liability sheet.

This is as good of a time as any to remind you, spend the miles when you have them, they are not accruing interest nor are they gaining value.

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Make Your United Partner Reward Bookings Now!

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If you missed the news, United is lowering the value of their mileage currency on February 1, 2014. The main area of impact is international premium cabin rewards, with those flights on United metal going up in price slightly, but flights on partners going up significantly.

Be sure and book your rewards soon if you want the lower prices. After February 1, 2014, any change to an award that requires the ticket to be reissued has the potential to be repriced at the new reward levels. I do have a prediction: the implementation/roll-out of this new price reward chart is not going to go off without a hitch.

If you want more information on the devaluation and what different flights will cost, Seth has a great breakdown here.

United Award Travel Complexity

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Yesterday I wrote about the United reward miles devaluation. The post focused on the change in the award redemption levels but I came across this post from Gabriel Leigh about how adding a level complexity to rewards is another piece of the devaluation puzzle.

However, and this is the important bit: the connection has to be one class of service lower than the longhaul segment on United. So a United business class booking to Frankfurt entitles you to economy on the Nuremberg connection. It’s just the sort of thing to exasperate thousands of unsuspecting Mileage Plus members when they call up to book a ticket. In a way, it gives you a break of sorts – you can book on partners in some cases when you have to, without paying more miles. But it’s also an unnecessary injection of complexity whose drawbacks are worse than its benefits, if you ask me.

I touched a little bit on this in my post but reading Leigh’s thoughts reiterated the idea that this creating a new complexity that will simply frustrate those who are not mileage runners or advanced mileage redeemers. I think the example Gabriel gives is a little too simple as a business class seat in most of Europe is really just a coach seat. Where it is going to get really frustrating for people is Asia. If I am flying Houston-San Francisco-Seoul on United metal and then connecting to Bangkok, Singapore, etc. on Asiana then I will have to fly that last segment in coach if I want the United mileage redemption price. That is a long segment (some upwards of 7 hours) in coach when redeeming a business class reward. When someone calls in because they found Asiana business class space for that one segment only to find out that they will have to pay the partner reward price, they are going to be a little irritated.

While there is a miles increase for partners, there is a complexity cost that only time will be able to measure.