While it appears Alaska Airlines will resolve its last-minute partner award blocking, that was but a symptom of a wider and ongoing problem: the death by a thousand cuts of partner award travel.
Partner Award Travel Is Harder Than Ever
I’m old enough to remember the good old days of partner award travel. Trips around the world in Lufthansa, SWISS, Turkish, ANA, and Thai First Class using Air Canada Aeroplan or United MileagePlus miles. I’m old enough to remember the days of cheap Emirates First Class awards on Alaska Airlines and the days when booking ANA First Class with Virgin Atlantic was as easy as picking up the phone and calling.
But over the last few years, we’ve seen a different trend. More seats are being held back. Fewer seats are released, even at the last minute. More and more carriers are restricting award travel to their own loyalty program members.
Here are some examples:
- Have you noticed how much more difficult it is lately to secure Lufthansa Group award space? Austrian Airlines, for example, has all but disappeared when using partners like Avianca LifeMiles, Aeroplan, or MileagePlus. SWISS space is also becoming far harder, even when there are many unsold seats.
- British Airways is now holding award space for its own Executive Club members, something it never did historically
- United Airlines is now reserving a subset of “saver” space (X) and (I) for its own members…the days of booking last-minute domestic awards on United flights via Aeroplan is now far more difficult.
- Air France and KLM have a solid loyalty program in Flying Blue, but good luck booking those flights, especially in a premium cabin, with any partner mileage currency
- We see this with airlines around the world, including JAL, Cathay Pacific, Qantas, and SAS
The importance of alliances is waning and carriers are realizing there is money to be made by restricting even last-minute awards to their own members, which of course encourages loyalty to their own frequent flyer programs.
Beyond more carriers holding back partner award space, we’ve seen award chart inflation and onerous restrictions on booking like we saw when Alaska Airlines suddenly and without warning blocked all partner redemptions within 72 hours of travel.
All hope is not lost: there are still deals to be had. But the idea of redeeming on partners has become far more illusory. Therefore, adjust your expectations accordingly and keep an eye on the trends: because what we are seeing is essentially a reversion to the pre-alliance paradigm in which partner award travel was far less prevalent.
Some frequent flyers will benefit from this, but many of us will not…yet better to recognize and adjust to this change than ignore it as it continues to get worse. My recommendation remains to stock your miles in flexible currencies like Chase Ultimate Rewards and American Express Membership Rewards…at least that flexibility provides a bit more redemption wiggle room.
I still see plenty of LHG award space on the routes that interest me (MEX, S. America, various bits of Africa). Unfortunately , I am not super keen on the product and DEFINITELY not keen on paying their extortionate surcharges. TK is very route-dependent.
The one *A airline that seems to have eliminated a great deal of partner award availability is TAP- there’s virtually nothing ever available in business between LIS and its numerous destinations in Brazil.
SkyTeam has been my backup alliance over the last few years, so I don’t have a clear picture of how things work with them, but pointsyeah does throw up J availability on the likes of UX.
I agree that the writing is on the wall. When I lost all status during the pandemic, that was a blessing in disguise. By 2023, I was a totally free agent. I also was on a mad rampage to burn miles. I have burned hundreds of thousands of miles so far (all to get a one way economy LGA-ATL on Skypeso….just joking). I still have 2 airlines to burn miles.
I see a time in the future where I will use miles on domestic economy trips, in part, due to loss of partner awards. The golden days of frequent flyer programs are over. It is now just a credit card reward scheme. The number of miles earned for paid flights is the worse it has ever been.
(Example….
JFK-SFO 2586 miles
1982 – 5163 miles earned for a round trip
1989 – the year of triple miles, over 15,300 miles for a round trip
2024 – if no status, earn about 1500 miles for a round trip
JFK-Europe
1982 – one domestic economy award ticket – 50,000 miles
1989 – one domestic economy award ticket – 20,000 miles, two transatlantic economy tickets (can be one person and both trips taken within a year) 50,000 miles
2024 – one domestic economy award ticket – around 30,000 miles, one transatlantic economy ticket around 50,000 to 125,000 miles
1989 – one transcon paid flight almost earns a domestic ticket
2024 – 20 transcon paid flights earns a domestic ticket
I think “partner awards” has to be bifurcated even further. From my experience (mainly DL and Sky Team), I have decent luck finding space on DL’s JV partners in Sky Team (mainly AF/KL). However, if DL isn’t in a JV with an airline (i.e. – just a SkyTeam member), it’s few and far between.
I am trying to find premium space using Alaska miles on JAL and it seems to not exist compared to what BA and AA show. Ditto with Qantas space.
Very sad.
Not as easy but still doable if you’re flexible & only traveling with 2 pax.
In conclusion, choose your loyalty program where you bank your points wisely and don’t be afraid to switch it up. I think there is still award availability out there to get where you need to go, but just not as plentiful as before and a lot of certain products are much more difficult to book now.
I will admit that Austrian award space has been a lot stingier than it was previously but I did find the occasional award seat (and have a flight with them booked next year). Also totally agree with your assessment on booking UA domestic availability via Aeroplan.
As for Cathay, based on their financial situation, I’m not surprised. It was good while it lasted.
As for Qantas and SAS, they had award availability? Not even sure if Qantas had J/F award availability on their Asia flights.
Qantas has some j availability. Lot of it is phantom on American if trying for two pax but one works. I’ve done Sydney to dfw and Tokyo in the last year for two pax close in.
Sadly my American mile stash is diminishing. Wish I’d bought ten x during the simply miles promotion
I don’t know. In the past few months I’ve booked:
-AUS-PTY in J on CM for 20K Aeroplan
-DXB-MCT in J on WY for only 6.8K Flying Blue!!
-MCT-DOH-CAI in F on QR for 30K AAdvantage miles.
-WAW-IST-NAP in J on TK for 20K Aeroplan
-CMB-KUL in J on UL for 22K Avios
-IST-CMB-AGP (with 23.5h in CMB) in J on AT for 25K AAdvantage miles
I guess if your only use of miles is long haul out of the US then maybe things aren’t rosy. But there remain so many amazing uses of miles. 57.5K TATL flights are always available and 70K QSuites are somewhat readily available using AAdvantage.
CMN on AT**
There is no doubt that outside of the U.S. there are sweet spots galore. I’m amazed what I get out of Vienna (a sort of second home) to Asia or the ME with wide open availability.
The problem is that airlines in the U.S. have so addicted the population to their credit cards and redemptions (it’s much less a thing in Europe) that for those here, the largest traveling population in the world, it’s become a true hell. All the airlines lock up redemptions with high rates to the U.S. because they can….Americans are gullible and with full pockets.
This is exactly why I can book a ticket to the U.S. originating from Vienna in paid J for a quarter of the price compared to originating in the U.S. They have suckered Americans into thinking that this is the standard market pricing. It may be, because of U.S. demand on origination. But they are gaming us. They are feeding on Americans who are willing to pay exorbitant prices for crap J service and none the wiser that the rest of the world laughs.
For most of the world, there’s an easy solution to this- just don’t travel to the USA for leisure. Hotels, restaurants etc are also super expensive compared to nearly everywhere else.
Those who are based in the US just have to adapt to the local nuances of the game, maximise sign up bonuses and whatnot
I feel the award inventory and predictability will return so a somewhat normalcy within next 2 years. 2023 and 2024 has been abysmal, although 2023 was due to exhorbitant demand, 2024 has been more aligned with trying to maximizing revenue, while trying to recoup outstanding miles by methods of devaluing their programs. I see same pattern on status upgrades being skipped for revenue based upsells. However ignoring FF programs isn’t really an option for any airline; by end of 2025 I see airlines seeing a dent in their mile sales bottom line and will have to make an adjustment. Almost every industry is cyclical and it takes an unusually long time for any travel based industry to normalize after a disruption. Not defending the airlines just being cautiously optimistic.
While I would hope you are correct we have been saying this now since 2022. As we do, the salvos keep getting fired over the bow. It’s never going back. Airlines are effectively turning FF programs into harder to win games of chance which lure you in with dreams but gives you less and less over time. They are boiling the frog.
Devaluations, stripping loyalty perks, alliance fragmentation, the list goes on. They will dangle the carrot of course, tell you that you matter and try to lure you into thinking things will return again. They won’t. Airlines are effectively (very effectively) feeding our addiction with false promises. They won’t go back because they know it’s working.
+1 to what Antwerp said.
Also, the airlines aren’t satisfied with just making profits on the loyalty program. Instead the order of the day is for the airline to grow revenue and to grow their profit margins pretty much year over year — and this usually means fleecing the loyalty program consumers more and more year over year. And another factor is that the LCC and de novo competitors are generally pretty much useless and cheap in their approach to frequent flyer programs and thus even the legacy majors find themselves without growing pressure from consumers and competitors when it comes to customer-unfriendly changes to frequent flyer programs.
It’s not just partner awards that are hurting. I’ve tried to use some of my six AA SWU’s on a number of trips but they won’t open anything up for when I actually need the space. And let’s not forget the incredible paucity of saver space in business and first class to Europe or Asia on American metal.
Delta and its darn “dynamic” mileage ticket pricing was the real major breaking point in airlines becoming extra-miserly with releasing space to partner airline programs. From then on, more and more airlines have been getting into this balkanization game with cutting back on spAce released to partner programs.
The solution to all this is don’t be poor and have to rely on sign up card bonuses to get a “free ticket” to Tokyo just because you watched some dopey Youtuber brag about it.