American Airlines has reduced the hold time on AAdvantage award tickets from five days to 24 hours, a move that is disappointing and yet very reasonable.
American Airlines Reduces AAdvantage Award Ticket Hold Time By 80%
Just yesterday, I put an AAdvantage award on hold for a client for five days…for years, AA has had the most generous award hold policy whereby:
- award bookings could be held for up to five days if you held a reservation 14 or more days before departure
- award bookings could be held for up to one day if you held a reservation within 14 days of departure
Those days were not defined as 24 hour periods, such that if you put on hold a ticket on Wednesday morning for travel within 14 days, you generally had until Thursday night at 11:59 pm local time to book it, giving you even more than 24 hours.
But One Mile A Time notes a policy change in effect today at American Airlines that reduces all award holds to 24 hours. This aligns award reservations with revenue reservations, which also offer 24 hours (with some exceptions).
It also makes sense. If you’re holding space, that means others cannot book it. Perhaps AA saw that too many people were making speculative bookings, which meant losing revenue customers.
I’m Thankful That Award Holds Are Still A Thing, Especially If You Need To Buy Miles
Of course, I’m not happy about this change in the sense that the five-day hold was generous and allowed for planning of hotels and other ground activities without having to confirm one at the risk of the other.
That will still be possible, but the time horizon will be compacted.
But AA was the only US carrier with such a generous hold policy and even with the hold time reduced by 80% for trips booked more than two weeks in advance, it’s still an option…and that’s a big deal. I’m also thankful that AA makes it so easy to hold awards…just go through the booking process, choose hold, click confirm, and you’re done…no credit card info needed and most importantly, you don’t need sufficient miles in the account in order to hold the award.
Finally, I note that AA also does not charge a reinstatement or cancellation fee for award tickets, so I recommend avoiding holds altogether and just ticketing reservations on the spot if you have the miles available. On rare occasions over the years, I have seen partner space drop off before the hold limit or suddenly “unconfirm,” and so the “bird in the hand…” concept applies here.
CONCLUSION
Advance planners who book more than 14 days in advance will no longer be able to hold American Airlines AAdvantage awards for five days: that hold time has been reduced to 24 hours to align award tickets with revenue tickets. While I do not celebrate this news, I do celebrate that at least AA still allows free award holds, which is more than United Airlines, Alaska Airlines, and Delta Air Lines do.
Will this change to award holds on AA adversely impact you?
From a loyalty member perspective it’s tough to see anything good about this. I guess you could go with weak sauce “It could be worse” but any time you have to resort to that you know things are bad. AAdvantage has already been butchered repeatedly since the merger but free 5 day award holds was one of the few bright spots in the program. Now they’ve killed that off with no notice.
The reservations already on the 5 day courtesy hold do not seem to be affected. I made one this morning (UK time), and it still shows the 5 day hold.
If someone can’t make a decision in 24 hours, F them. If they are too important to answer your phone call or email, F them. If what you are doing for them $150 to get back to you, F them.
A simple change in your policies will ensure they respond in time or F them. My guess is to most of your customers $150 is nothing, along the lines of what they pay their illegal house cleaner daily or what they give a ‘ho to “forget” what they looked like. Let’s face it, if they are too busy or the time isn’t worth it that they pay $150 for you to do the work for them, it’s pocket change to them. F them.
Good decision by American.
I wonder how industry leading DL handles this?
So much for having an AAdvantage.