One Mile at a Time recently reported on a “devaluation” of sorts when using American Airlines miles to book American Airlines flights. While some will surely point to transfers from Citi as the main motivation here, it seems that this “devaluation” probably predates transfers and it only affects itineraries comprised solely of American Airlines flights, which were already subject to variable pricing. Thankfully, partner awards (including mixed awards including American Airlines and partners on the same ticket) remain unaffected.
American’s sort-of devaluation situation
As One Mile at a Time reported, American Airlines is sometimes charging more for business class awards on their own flights (AA metal), but as Ben points out in his post, the “new” pricing is simply more in line with the “starting at” prices on American’s sort-of-award chart.
To be clear, American Airlines offers dynamic award pricing on its own flights. They still publish an award chart, but that chart offers “starting at” award pricing rather than firm pricing. See below:
That award chart has been around for flights since May 1, 2023. However, it was mostly meaningless because we have very commonly seen awards pricing below the “starting at” prices on the award chart. For instance, I’ve found American-operated business class flights to Europe for 60K miles a number of times in recent years despite the 75K “starting at” price on the chart. The same could be said about select flights to many other regions.
However, over time, award pricing has crept up to catch up with the award chart. We’re now seeing awards on AA-operated itineraries actually starting at the “starting at” pricing in some cases. That’s not necessarily a brand new development but rather something that happened over time.
And it’s not universal. I didn’t search for long before finding an AA-operated award from Rome to Dallas for 65,000 miles one way.
That’s 10,000 miles fewer than the AA award chart starting price shown above (which shows 75K for business class to/from Europe). These types of awards are still findable, but you’ll also find some nonstop awards pricing closer to the chart (and obviously many flight options that cost far more since American has embraced dynamic pricing).
Is this really a devaluation?
Given the dynamic nature of American’s award chart, it’s hard to really call this a “devaluation” per se. I’m sure that some will point to transfers from Citi ThankYou Rewards as being a direct cause of AA devaluation, but given the gradual increase and already-dynamic nature of American Airlines flight awards it seems hard to point to transfers from Citi as a core reason.
It does seem likely that we may see pricing rise over time on AA’s own flights simply because of greater demand for AA awards thanks to transfers. However, this doesn’t necessarily appear to be that but rather a slow upward adjustment that was likely intended all along (as evidenced by the “starting at” pricing on the chart).
Partner awards, including mixed AA + partner awards, remain unaffected
The good news here is that partner awards still price according to the partner award chart, even when they include a segment(s) on American Airlines.
It probably seems intuitive that an award where the long-haul is on a partner-operated flight and American is only operating a short segment, the award prices according to the partner award chart.
However, this is also true in cases where the long-haul is on American Airlines and the connection is on a partner. For instance, see this example with a Finnair segment from Helsinki to Rome followed by that same Rome-to-Dallas business class American Airlines-operated flight for 57,500 miles. You’ll save miles by having a leading segment on a partner in this case.
That’s all great news as the American Airlines partner award chart contains a number of great-value sweet spots and it continues to offer good value even when AA is the most significant carrier on your award.
Examples abound in the other direction as well, such as these examples on American Airlines from Cleveland to Philadelphia and Philadelphia to London followed by a segment on Iberia from London to Madrid, which prices at 57,500 miles one way in business class.
Similar situations can be found looking at other regions as well where itineraries continue to price according to the partner award chart so long as there is at least one segment operated by American Airlines on the itinerary.
Bottom line
American Airlines has quietly increased award pricing on some of its own international business class awards, though in those cases, they have merely increased some awards to price closer to the “starting at” prices listed on the award chart. And, importantly, not all flights have been affected to the same extent, with some routes continuing to price below the “starting at” award price.
The partner award chart, which covers both travel entirely on partners as well as awards where some segments are operated by a partner and others by AA, continues to offer the same excellent value opportunities. As you’ll hear on this week’s coffee break, Greg and I are not convinced that transfers from Citi will have any direct effect on the AA partner award chart. That said, most people in this space have been expecting an AA partner award chart devaluation for the past several years, so it remains possible that could be coming at any time.
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AA cannot be trusted to do anything. I was looking for biz flights to SYD various dates. From DAY 950k, from CLT 250k.
Please explain this craziness
Nick . . . and the entire team . . . as always, thanks for the breadth and depth of analysis. FM is the only site that gets into meaningful technical execution within the hobby. Newbies, take note and learn.
I honestly couldn’t care less if AA increases the cost of transatlantic biz class tickets. That’s always been a meh deal on flights that aren’t even particularly long (at least from the East Coast). The value in the Advantage program in recent years has been in COACH (gasp) flights in the Western hemisphere. AA has had fantastic redemptions,especially compared to its competitors and when the alternative would be a very expensive out of pocket fare. Heck, for this month and September, they were recently offering 5K seats (I bought a couple). That’s like 15 domestic flights compared to one biz class ticket.
This is 100% true. People in this space obsess over international business class but you can regularly get ~3 cpp from AA domestic economy redemptions without any effort at all.
The dynamic algorithm doesn’t always smile on you, but when it does AA is hard to beat – particularly for long North America flights. You can get 5 hour transcon flights for 5K – 7K economy and 17.5K domestic first. That’s almost as long as east coast to Europe flights, and thinking of the points as 1 cpp it’s like flying for $10 per hour!
I don’t know that using Finnair partner award searches is the most accurate as many can be phantom award seats but good blog post on this topic.
For intra-European flights? I’ve booked a number of intra-European Finnair flights through AA and AS for travel later this year and haven’t run into any phantom availability on those. Anyway, you could do the same thing with MAD-FCO-DFW where the leading segment is on Iberia, as I know you know, it was just an example.