Alaska not allowing frequent flyer number change on award tickets

As flagged by Loyalty Lobby, Alaska airlines has added a weird restriction on award tickets: according to their terms, you can not change the frequent flyer number associated with your reservation on an award ticket. In other words, if you book a ticket using your Alaska miles for travel on British Airways, you can’t change out your Alaska Airlines frequent flyer number for your American Airlines frequent flyer number in order to use your American Airlines elite status to access a British Airways or other oneworld lounge (for instance). I suspect that this may be tough for Alaska to enforce, but I also wonder whether they may take action against serial offenders who try to skirt this rule.

This restriction is both strange and concerning

Alaska’s updated award chart page now contains the following passage:

When redeeming miles for an award ticket from Alaska Mileage Plan account, customer cannot enter another airline’s frequent flyer number and is thus ineligible for benefits from another program.

This is a strange restriction in the sense that most other loyalty programs don’t prohibit changing the frequent flyer number associated with a reservation. That said, it isn’t always easy to do so. For instance, if you book a United flight through Turkish Miles & Smiles, good luck getting the frequent flyer number changed to anything else — United certainly refuses to do it (that said, when it comes to accessing Star Alliance lounges, you don’t actually need the partner’s frequent flyer number attached to the reservation — you can simply show your Star Alliance Gold status to access a lounge).

With some airlines, this is a matter of pulling up your reservation through some other alliance website to change the frequent flyer number. Or a check-in or lounge agent may be able to help you change your frequent flyer number.

But to my knowledge, this is the first restriction of exactly this kind. One Mile at a Time marvels at why Alaska would do this since Ben reports that his understanding is that the airline with which you have status pays for your lounge access, not the airline that issues your ticket (assuming they are different). Ben wonders why Alaska would care that you switched your frequent flyer number in this case.

I might guess that Ben is right that Alaska doesn’t necessarily care. However, I bet that American Airlines might care if they have to pay Qantas for first class lounge access while you use your Alaska miles to fly on Japan Airlines (which may or may not be a realistic example — my point here is that American probably does care about being on the hook for elite benefits it while you travel an alliance airline using miles from another alliance airline. To be clear, that sort of thing probably happens a lot around the world, but maybe they had the ability to exert some pressure on Alaska as the two work together within the United States.

I’m no expert on inside industry information like that, so this is entirely speculation on my part that may be unfounded. Ben is much more attuned to the inner workings of these loyalty programs, so it may well be that he is right that this just doesn’t make any sense, but I wonder whether the cost (to American Airlines) of easy American Airlines elite status is adding up and American is looking to tighten the ways in which you can leverage those status benefits.

Will other airlines follow suit on this?

My even bigger concern here is whether we’ll see other airlines follow suit with similar policies. That would really stink for those who strategically choose how to pursue elite status. Losing access to alliance-wide benefits while redeeming miles for partner awards could be a sizable hit for a lot of travelers.

I imagine that we wouldn’t see this type of restriction expand beyond award tickets. And I hope that this doesn’t expand beyond Alaska (and that Ben is right that most other airline agents won’t even be aware of Alaska’s policy here). Still, if airlines can get away with this kind of restriction, I could imagine a world in which some other airlines might try to follow Alaska’s lead — and that would be really disappointing. Hopefully this ends up being a nothingburger tucked away in the terms that isn’t particularly enforced.

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