American Airlines offered an outstanding deal in long haul first-class and great prices on business class fares. As much as we all want to hate airlines eliminating award charts, this example shows excellent advantages to doing so.
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American Airlines Hasn’t Fully Eliminated Award Charts
While Delta and United Airlines have done away with award charts and scared their most loyal customers, American has stated that they won’t eliminate award charts. But that’s not entirely true either.
American Airlines has some base pricing but pulling up nearly any route will show myriad of prices for any route. They have acknowledged that they do not need to switch to a dynamic or variably-priced award chart, but have essentially done so anyway. Usually, this means awards cost more, not less. More importantly, it makes it impossible for consumers to save their points for a trip.
American’s Web Specials Offer Value
American Airlines has been running award redemption specials that mostly provide a small discount on coach awards with restrictions for those without Executive Platinum status. The Web Special awards are valid only on specific flights with specific dates, and the dates cannot be moved.
These awards can be placed on hold for up to five days, can be cancelled and refunded for a fee, or those with status may be able to redeposit the awards for free as the program allows. However, the great flexibility most American Airlines awards have do not apply.
None of the coach Web Specials has been entirely inspiring until this week. American offered roundtrips to the Hawaiian islands for 28,000 in coach, 56,000 in first-class. That’s a small discount for either class but flies in the face of the trend of American Airlines Advantage program.
But true value can be found in their first-class Web Specials for Hong Kong last week. In July of 2020, fares to Hong Kong in true first-class was made available for 61,000 miles in each direction. It’s hard enough to find business class awards on the Dallas-Hong Kong route from American, to find first-class for nearly the saver business class price is a steal.
American Is Showing Customers How Dynamic Awards Can Be Good For Consumers
The point of dynamic award charts is to add value for both parties. Airlines can occupy seats on flights that are empty, clear off some liability from the books and add restrictions that protect the carrier from offering wholesale discounts to customers.
For consumers, however, flexible travellers can gain significant advantages. For example, European business class roundtrips from as far as the west coast were offered recently for less than 88,000 miles/roundtrip. Prices haven’t been that low in a decade, and points are cheaper and easier to come by than they ever were before. These first-class awards on American’s 777-300ER to Hong Kong are also their longest flight in the system, there’s not a better possible redemption than this.
Conclusion
There’s plenty of reason to be concerned about dynamic, variably-priced awards, but American is showing there are some strong advantages for consumers who are looking for great deals. American Airlines still needs to repair a lot with its Advantage program, including releasing space with regularity and advance notice. But for all of the reasons I, and many other travel writers, are concerned about dynamically-priced awards, this seems to be a case of the carrier adding a compelling reason to have miles with American.
What do you think? Is American demonstrating value with their Web Special deals? Is this just a flash in the pan for an untrustworthy program?
Anyone who would waste miles for AA F to Asia is a fool. It’s a joke of a product. AA intl. F to anywhere for that matter is a complete waste of miles. Chime in AA Business as well. I say this of course in case AA management is wondering why so many premium seats are taken by non-revs.
With so many options I would rather spend more miles elsewhere for a decent airline in business than American in F. Or, just pay the often good promo fares in business to Asia that come up every week.
I really wish AA would’ve stepped up in the IT department before implementing these. In 2020, still not being able to cancel and process a redeposit online is beyond shameful. Even UA…UNITED, of all the garbage carriers with substandard IT systems handles this with no problem! It’s such a pain as an EXP to have to call and redeposit, especially with these ‘specials’ as the price fluctuates (goes down) so much. But I digress.
United had a lot of IT issues many years ago, but the website and mobile app have been light years ahead of AA for a long, long time now.
So your main evidence for this argument about how great dynamic pricing is is a sale to Hong Kong in July? Hong Kong is miserably muggy in July, not a popular leisure destination at that time. And of course bookings to Hong Kong have fallen off a cliff because of the unrest, so no surprise AA is putting awards for sale. We’d need to see some sales to desirable destinations – and we’re not going to see them precisely because they’re desirable.
A major point to consider in your example is that American’s product to Asia is pretty much awful. Offering a lower award price is just a minimal enticement that still probably isn’t worth it.
As to your premise that “The point of dynamic award charts is to add value for both parties.”, I couldn’t disagree more. If this was some mutually beneficial concept, American would offer saver space in business or first class on a very regular basis. Instead, American is absolutely notorious for being extremely restrictive on award space when it would favor the customer. This is in no way valuable to both parties.
While I don’t disagree that Web Specials provide value today, your assumptions in this post rest on AA actually acting in good faith going forward. Simply put, I don’t trust them as long as Doug Parker and the rest of the America West gang remain in charge. I suspect this is a case of AA throwing us poor schleps a bone now while they prepare to drop the hammer on us later. We’ll see, because if what we see today really does represent what to expect going forward, I’m going to be able to get some seriously outsized value from the program.