I changed a Lifemiles award as a Lifemiles Plus subscriber, and it was painless

This summer, my wife, kids, and I plan to visit Europe with a family member (traveling as a party of 5). I long ago locked in 5 seats in business class with an Avianca Lifemiles redemption. Then, last week, my wife asked if we could bump the trip to Europe by about a week. My initial expectation was that we’d never find availability to bump the trip, and that even if we did, it might be a hassle to change it. I’m glad to report that I found availability. More importantly, the change, though not quite perfect, went much more smoothly than I would have expected.

Subscribing to Lifemiles Plus for “free” changes can be a very reasonable deal

If you’re redeeming a significant number of Lifemiles, it just doesn’t make sense not to subscribe to Lifemiles Plus prior to making a redemption.

I’ve written before about Lifemiles Plus, the subscription service offered by Avianca Lifemiles. For a monthly fee, you can subscribe to “buy” miles each month and receive a number of additional benefits.

There are two key benefits to subscribing to Lifemiles Plus:

• 10% discount on mileage redemptions for award flights (including on partner awards)
• Free award changes and cancellations. Note that this benefit is only valid for Lifemiles Plus “Basic” ($50 per month) and above. The “Lite” membership ($20 per month) does not include free changes and cancellations.

Here are the subscription tiers. I’ve noted before that it is only really worth considering “Lite” (if you’re only interested in the 10% discount) or “Basic” (if free changes and cancellations are important).

Once you subscribe, you must keep your subscription for a minimum of six months as per the terms of the program.

You must be a Lifemiles Plus subscriber at the time of booking to take advantage of the 10% mileage discount, which means that you’re on the hook for $120 in cost to get the 10% mileage discount benefit. For a single award for one or two passengers, that might not make sense. But if you’re booking multiple awards or even a single award for multiple passengers, the savings add up quickly. Consider my example situation, booking a one-way business class itinerary to Europe for five passengers on a route with below-average award pricing even for non-subscribers:

Buying Lifemiles Plus Lite for $20 per month for the minimum required 6 months would cost me $120 and get me 3,000 miles from the subscription (500 miles per month) while saving me 27,500 miles for this single award booking. That’s a cost of just under 0.4c per mile. It wouldn’t make sense to pay the full award price for five passengers without subscribing.

But the $20-per-month “Lite” subscription does not include free changes or cancellations.

You need to be a subscriber at the “Basic” tier ($50 per month) or higher at the time of making the change or cancellation to take advantage of free changes or cancellations (you do not need to be subscribed at the time of booking, only the time of change or cancellation). I covered that in a previous post.

In other words, even if I wasn’t a Lifemiles Plus subscriber at all before I made my redemption, I could later subscribe to Lifemiles Plus Basic for free changes and cancellations. As long as I am a Lifemiles Plus Basic ($50/month) or higher subscriber at the time when I want to change my award, I can change or cancel for free.

Existing subscribers need to know that while it is possible to change subscriptions, a change does not take effect until the next billing date.

For instance, I was on the $20 per month “Lite” plan at the time when I made my redemption (as noted above, the mileage savings easily justified that cost). I upgraded to the “Basic” plan ($50/month) in order to get free changes and cancellations on this award (I had a feeling we might need flexibility). Upgrading “right away” meant that my subscription wasn’t actually upgraded until the 7th of the following month. I don’t believe I would have had access to free changes or cancellations before the date when my next subscription was charged. It is worth being aware of the timeline.

In my case, I was upgrading about 6 months before the flight. I would theoretically be on the hook for 6 months at $50 per month ($300). In exchange, I would get 12,000 total miles (2K miles per month from the subscription).

Even if I didn’t value the 12,000 miles at all, paying a total of $300 for 5 passengers ($60 per passenger) to make our awards fully flexible (with unlimited changes and cancellations within those six months leading up to my trip) didn’t seem unreasonable.

Consider that I paid fewer than 50,000 miles per passenger (plus less than $100 each) for business class to Europe (I wrote about the itinerary here). Air Canada Aeroplan would have charged 70,000 miles for the “lowest” cost for the same itinerary (with a $100 CAD change or $150 CAD cancellation fee) or 84,000 miles for a fully flexible booking. Paying for a flexible booking via Aeroplan for the same itinerary would have cost 34,000 more miles per passenger — a total of 170,000 more miles (before we even consider the fact that I had taken advantage of a Lifemiles transfer bonus). United Mileage Plus would have charged 88,000 miles per passenger for a total difference of 190,000 miles. Paying a total of $300 (the cost for 6 months of Lifemiles Basic) for free changes and cancellations rather than paying an additional 170,000 or 190,000 miles seemed like a steal, comparatively.

In my case, I think the net “cost” is an even better deal than that. As explained above, the mileage savings alone easily justified paying $20 per month for 6 months for the “Lite” plan (to get the 10% discount). Through that lens, paying the additional $30 per month for 6 months (an additional $180 total) for a “Basic” subscription yielded 9,000 additional miles from the subscription and locked in free changes and cancellations. Back in January, I originally wrote that I would hold off on upgrading to “Basic” until I needed to make a change. However, after further consideration, I decided it was relatively likely that we might need the flexibility, and the additional cost was a reasonable upcharge.

I’m glad I did that.

My experience calling to change an award booking as a Lifemiles Plus Basic subscriber

I expected the biggest pain point to be the phone.

Unfortunately, Lifemiles did not make it possible to make changes or cancellations online. In fact, though I could view the reservation under “My trips”, Lifemiles provided no tools at all for managing the reservation.

Even figuring out how to call was unintuitive. As seen above, the only option to manage the reservation says “Contact us”, but that link simply redirects to the Avianca.com home page. Selecting “Manage your booking” from the home page and entering booking info brought up yet another link.

That link led to a form to fill out for support. That seemed far too slow since award availability for my change could evaporate at any time. I couldn’t find a phone number for support.

After fiddling around with the website for a few minutes longer than I should have, I looked up an old Frequent Miler post that I knew had a phone number for Avianca Lifemiles in it. Sure enough, I was able to get through to an agent using the phone number in that post (though it’s worth a word of warning that airlines do sometimes change their numbers, so best practice is to find the phone number on an official airline page, as we won’t know if and when Avianca changes their phone numbers).

I called and explained that I wanted to make a change to an existing booking as a Lifemiles Plus subscriber. The agent was friendly, knowledgeable, and clear. I gave her our preferred date, but she insisted that there were only 3 seats available on that date (rather than the 5 we needed), despite the fact that the Lifemiles website showed availability for five passengers. That was a little frustrating. She chalked it up to the fact that availability changes constantly, and the website may not have updated yet.

I had her check one day earlier (which also showed availability online), and she did see the 5 seats we wanted on that date. That worked almost as well for us. I went ahead and had her make the change. I intended to call back the next day to try again for a switch to the date we preferred, but the flight we wanted no longer showed availability.

The agent told me that she would first have to release the original reservation and then rebook the new itinerary. That made me a little nervous, since it meant giving up what we already had confirmed before the new flights were locked up. Nonetheless, I told her to proceed.

She completed the entire process within just a few minutes and then told me that I would receive the new tickets “within 24 hours”.

The entire call took less than 12 minutes.

I once again felt a bit disconcerted when I logged into my Lifemiles account and did not see any reservation at all under “My Trips” for the rest of the day, nor did I receive an email confirming the change before I went to sleep. However, by the time I woke up the next morning, I had received the emails with the new ticket information, as promised.

I had anticipated that we might need to pay some small difference in taxes & fees due to currency conversion changes, but the change was fast & free — just as advertised.

Bottom line

Avianca Lifemiles has a reputation for subpar customer service, and I sometimes hear people hesitate to even consider the program due to that reputation. There’s no doubt that there are real limitations; the Lifemiles website doesn’t always show itineraries that should be bookable, and the cancellation fees are painful without Lifemiles Plus. However, I find Lifemiles Plus to be a reasonable deal for securing free changes and cancellations. And I once again had a positive experience with customer service, this time making a very easy change thanks to my Lifemiles Plus subscription. I wouldn’t recommend paying the subscription fee on an ongoing basis, but it can easily make sense to pay for at least the Lite tier when redeeming 100,000+ Lifemiles, and free changes and cancellations can make the upcharge for Basic or higher easily worthwhile.

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