While Alaska Airlines has not officially confirmed whether it was a glitch or a preview of what is to come, bookings on partner carriers were unavailable for several hours today for travel departing within 72 hours, whether booking online or over the phone. If Alaska is considering such a blanket ban, this is a deeply disturbing development.
Alaska Airlines Temporarily Restricted Partner Awards Within 72 Hours Of Travel…Now Bookable Again
As flagged by One Mile At A Time, earlier today if you tried to book a partner award within 72 hours of departure, you either saw no results or if a result did come up, you received the following error message when trying to book:
Too Close to Departure
It is too close to the scheduled departure time to purchase this flight. Please start shopping again.
Indeed, all of my searches turned up no space for departures before Saturday, even though such award space was widely available to other partners:
This space was also not bookable via the Alaska Airlines MileagePlan call center.
There did appear to be an exception for American Airlines.
But whatever was the cause, Alaska appears to have rolled back the restriction because it is once again possible to book last-minute partner awards:
This isn’t the first time Alaska has introduced such a 72-hour advance booking restriction. This was added for intra-Asia awards in 2018. The reason given was to combat fraud.
> Read More: Latest Alaska Devaluation Was Bizarre Overreaction
We’ve discussed fraud in the past and I will only say here that you don’t throw away the baby with the bathwater. As I said in 2018, if fraud was the issue, Alaska could have easily imposed a less draconian solution:
- Redemptions only for the member within 72 hours of travel
- Redemption only for the member or those with the same surname within 72 hours of travel
- Telephone-only redemption within 72 hours of travel
It’s often that final 72 hours before travel when partners finally release award space, so to restrict such travel would represent a massive devaluation to the program.
We will need to mark this situation as developing for now, but I am hopeful that today was a glitch rather than a preview of things to come…
> Read More: Alaska Airlines Violates Our Trust…Again
There have been a few comments as well from people who have claimed it’s been cropping up for a few weeks now.
I asked Alaska about this before Ben posted about it. I haven’t heard back.
This is a bigger deal than just ‘people book travel close to departure’ and ‘that’s when there’s award space’. My even bigger concern is when you’re somewhere abroad looking for a way to get home. You need to change your trip. Maybe you got stranded somewhere. Maybe you got sick. You have to sit for several extra days? If fraud is the concern, focus on the accounts most likely to engage in fraud, or the routes. Focus on China. Exempt elites and co-brand cardmembers. This sledgehammer is terrible.
100% agree.
I got hit by it this morning and then went to see if it was covered anywhere and it hadn’t been. Then I got hit by it again and eventually saw that OMAAT had covered the issue. Yesterday afternoon I had no problem booking the same trip using AS miles! So I was not a happy camper that I had to switch to the BA stash today.
I was about to get an AlaskaAir credit card but what’s the point when most all of my r
Well said Gary.
I commented this on the OMAAT article and I’ll say it here too in hopes that eventually someone from Alaska will see this: how on earth do they not have 2 factor authentication? Such a basic security measure has been widely available for years and would help eliminate a ton of mileage fraud. Somehow their IT team doesn’t know how to implement it.
We are assuming it is fraud…but yes, there are far better ways to safeguard than a blanket ban.
This change by Alaska Air has already adversely impacted me twice today.
This change was deliberately developed by Alaska Air. It was not a rogue development in the IT area who did this.
Why do you think they pulled it back?
I would guess that they want to have this kind of thing as a tool in the arsenal to eat into mileage ticket theft and/or the business of last minute ticket brokers (if different). But there are three other hypotheticals that I consider as potential additional reasons for why they may want this kind of capability/restriction, but I just lost most of what I wrote about that disappear due to hyper-delete, but in short those had to do with money and with means to devalue the miles/cap outlays without changes to mileage ticket pricing in miles. [I don’t have the will right now to retype everything I wrote before it got deleted on my side.]
I bet they take a cash paying customer
Well, this might explain why nearly all Qantas redemption availability has disappeared over the last month…and good luck finding ANY J/F redemptions on partners across the Pacific throughout their entire booking calendar (with the exception of StarLux, which has redemption rates approaching Delta SkyPeso levels).
Mileage Plan sucks. plain and simple. might still be great compared to other programs but it’s definitely degraded greatly since joining oneworld. so many other programs see availability sometimes that Alaska NEVER shows. changing FFPs
Agreed – I don’t think it has improved at all, even if the former sweet spots were illusory.
I have been having a field day with 4.5k-10k short and mid-haul trips using AS miles for AA flights,
Oh, I forgot to mention this: my BA-issued mileage ticket for yesterday’s recovery from AS’s mileage ticket block came with a complimentary upgrade on an AA flight using my AA elite status. Completely surprised me that the waitlisted complimentary upgrade worked and that I got it.