Triangle Trip

AA has finally adopted Alaska Airlines‘ one-way reward model.  Passengers are no longer required to book a full roundtrip reward, but can segment out legs of the trip.  Think about the opportunities that you have missed in the past:

1.  While booking your reward ticket, you see that one leg of the trip requires an AAnytime  (50k) ticket, while the other leg only requires a MileSAAver (25k) ticket.  Instead of paying 50k, you now only pay 37.5k!

2.  While booking a normal ticket and comparing prices, you see that one leg of the journey was 3x as expensive as the other, but it still didn’t make economical sense to use your points on this one.

3.  You decide to extend your stay on a trip, but it’s prohibitively expensive to change your return ticket

4.  You’re running from the law and you’re not coming back stateside

No, this doesn’t excuse poor service and whatever other faults American Air may have, but it’s a great reach out to its core customer base.

American Airlines new Flex Rewards webpage

Video announcement by the President of the AAdvantage Program

-Terminal D

United announced that they will offer Elite Qualifying Miles (EQM) from today to June 15, 2009 (here’s the link to register). With this promotion, you can make Premier Executive on UAL with 5 coast-to-coast trips. United obviously did this promotion in response to American Airline’s recently EQM promotion (here’s the link to register). Had you gone with UAL’s previous offer of paying for EQM or miles to gets status (see my previous post blasting on UAL for being desperate), you’d feel like a total fool.

So … will ghetto Delta be the next airline to offer a similar promotion? Delta did a similar promotion in 2008. It would not surprise me to see them counter UAL and AA in the next day or two.

All airlines have depreciated their mileage programs and offering fast track to obtaining status. What’s the value of earning actual miles and having loyalty to an airline? Hence we recommend you book hotel points with your credit cards (see previous post) and choose the most efficient way to travel as status does not matter on US airlines. The entire industry is heading to a bail out like banks, Detroit, etc.

I have been getting tons of emails from all airlines about mileage promotions. Most recently I received an email from American telling me a 33% discount if I bought 1,000+ miles. Here’s the link in case some are interested.

Buying AA Miles

If you look at the offer, it’s really not worth it. The asking price for 1,000 is $27.50 — that is $0.275 per mile when the airline industry standard is $0.01 per mile. Furthermore, airlines are applying more fees when you use your miles to redeem for flights.

If you are serious about purchasing miles, ghetto Delta has a better deal. Here’s the link if you’re interested. To create confusion and masking the actual cost, Delta is asking for $59.13 for 2,000 + 2,000 free bonus miles. If you do the math, it’s $0.147 per mile – as 50% savings compared to AA.

Buy Skymiles

United is the most expensive out of the big three airlines. UAL wants $67.25 for 1,000 miles. In addition, UAL also wants to charge you a $35 service fee. I could understand that Delta & American may be higher because points.com is processing the mileage purchase for you but UAL seem to be doing the mileage fulfillment themselves.

Buy UAL miles

Are these airlines serious? Do they think people would actually pay for airline miles when they are depreciating them? I will have a follow up post on what you should do with your miles in a few days.