Etihad has long had an awful award cancellation policy. Last month, they managed to somehow make it even worse. The cheapest awards can no longer be refunded at all (you lose all of the miles if you cancel at any time), and even the most expensive “Deluxe” awards can not be refunded within 72 hours of departure. If you book an award through Etihad Guest, you’re really making a gamble, as any change in circumstances will lead to losing the entire value of your ticket, which erases a substantial part of the traditional advantage of an award ticket.
Etihad has launched a new set of rules for award cancellation (and they’re awful)
Etihad already had a very punitive set of rules regarding award ticket cancellation, but the policy has gotten significantly worse with the latest changes.
Etihad has several award types, including Value, Comfort, and Deluxe. A few weeks ago, they updated the cancellation fees as follows:
As you can see above, the cheapest (“Value”) award tickets can no longer be cancelled at all. The “x” in the chart is for the way that Etihad will completely cross out the value of your points, because there are no refunds at all for Value awards after booking (note that I believe awards to/from the US should still carry free cancellation within 24 hours of booking).
Comfort tickets can only be cancelled up to 72 hours in advance, with the penalty being 25% of the original ticket price (which isn’t as simple/straightforward as that sounds).
Deluxe awards, the most expensive Etihad Guest awards, can be cancelled for free more than 72 hours in advance. However, even the most expensive Etihad award tickets can not be cancelled less than 72 hours prior to departure. That’s an awful policy for awards that can cost a lot of miles. While I wouldn’t begrudge Etihad for a reasonable penalty, losing all of your miles in the event of a family emergency that cancels the trip just doesn’t feel reasonable as compared to almost every other airline award program in the world.
All award tickets can be changed more than 72 hours in advance, but the fee on “Value” tickets is about $163 USD at the time of writing (per ticket). Contrast that with the many award programs that offer free changes and cancellations, and there seems to be little reason to engage with Etihad Guest, given the inflexibility of the rewards and high cost of changes.
What does this mean for Etihad awards on JetBlue?
I’ve written a number of times this year about redeeming Etihad Guest miles for JetBlue award tickets. In some cases, that can provide tremendous value. While I had mostly sworn off using Etihad Guest miles because of the awful cancellation policies, I ended up using them for JetBlue several times this year (and my opinion on the cancellation penalty changed somewhat after my own experience cancelling a cheap award ticket).
However, I have only seen “Value” awards for travel on JetBlue. That means that Etihad-booked JetBlue awards are now completely nonrefundable, and are only changeable up to 72 hours in advance (and at a cost of ~$163 per ticket). You might be willing to live with that for a close-in low-cost booking (awards on JetBlue start at 6,020 miles and about $19 one-way), but I can’t imagine booking for my family of four on a route that costs a lot of points. Some medium-distance JetBlue routes cost 15,000 miles per passenger. I would stand to lose 60K miles as a family of four if one of my kids got sick and he had to cancel (or more than $640 in change fees if we changed at least 72hrs in advance. Needless to say, I won’t be considering Etihad for booking in those situations unless it is close enough to departure for me to be very sure about the trip.
I already mostly recommended Etihad for close-in Jetblue bookings (particularly since Etihad seems to maintain access to award space even when cash tickets climb in price). That advice solidifies with these changes.
Etihad also has a really complicated system for figuring Comfort cancellation fees
The chart above shows that Comfort tickets incur a penalty of 25% for cancellation. While you might be forgiven for assuming that means you will lose 25% of the miles used for the award, the reality isn’t nearly so simple.
I wrote about my own experience with this strange system under the old cancellation policies. The basic story is that Etihad figures the cancellation by taking 25% of the miles you’ve paid and also 25% of the taxes & fees that you have paid. However, they ultimately keep the entire amount paid in taxes & fees and refund the amount due back in the form of miles. So, for instance, if you paid 100,000 miles and $400 in taxes & fees and you are subject to a 25% cancellation penalty, you’ll get back 75,000 miles + 15,000 miles.
You might have expected that Etihad would keep 25,000 of your miles and keep $100 of your money, refunding you $300. Nope! Instead, they keep the entire $400 and refund you what they deem to be three hundred bucks worth of miles. So instead of refunding $300 of your taxes & fees, they give you 15,000 miles back, valuing those miles at $0.02 per mile (a “$300 value).
That’s a really bad policy. For starters, you might not fashion yourself a buyer of Etihad Guest miles at 2 cents per mile, so the 15,000 miles might not feel akin to getting back $300. Second, Etihad Guest miles are subject to Etihad’s expiration policy (whereas your money wouldn’t have expired). Third, most airlines will tell you that their miles “have no cash value” and belong to the program. Getting refunded for your cash component in miles is very much unideal.
Bottom line
I just can’t think of a good reason to engage with Etihad Guest apart from transferring at the last minute to book a close-in award, and even in those cases, the savings of booking through Etihad would need to be substantial to make it worth considering Etihad Guest. Etihad tends to offer much better award availability far in advance, but given these terrible change and cancellation policies, I just don’t see much value in crediting paid flights to Eithad versus crediting to a different program. Keep in mind that wheretocredit.com can help you determine the best program to credit a paid flight.
H/T: One Mile at a Time
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I really don’t understand companies that want to make money off the misfortune of others. It’s not a good business model: you’ll have fewer customers, and the ones you do keep will be less loyal. Travel is inherently unpredictable and “stuff will happen” to everyone eventually. I really love how, during Covid, the major US airlines eliminated most of their onerous change fees, especially for award travel. It makes me want to do more business with them. I can understand why you might want to charge SOMETHING to change flights, if only to recoup some of the cost for “convenience” changes. But once the fees get to 100 bucks or more, the change fees get annoyingly expensive, especially if you are traveling with others.
The worst part of the Etihad program is the seemingly random account “suspensions,” which have been reported by other bloggers as well. In my case, my account had apparently been suspended for three years, and I did not find out until I attempted a last-minute booking before my miles expired. By the time the account was reactivated, all of the miles had already expired. Their Terms & Conditions state that Etihad can suspend an account at any time without notification, and that during suspension a member may still deposit, transfer, or purchase miles—just not redeem them.