A perfect storm rolled in on me. Much to my surprise, Aviator Silver Companion Certificates saved the day.
A few months ago, I wrote a post titled Aviator Silver Companion Certificate: First impressions. In that post, I shared the details I’d learned about Aviator Silver Companion certificates. For those unfamiliar, the invitation-only Barclays AAdvantage Aviator Silver Mastercard offers a one-time-use companion certificate that allows the certificate holder to book a round trip domestic economy class ticket and add two companions for $99 each (plus taxes) after spending $20,000 in a cardmember year on the card and renewing for another year. I covered details about qualifying fare classes, blackout dates, and the timing with which our certificates posted in that previous “first impressions” post. In this post, I’ll share my experience using the certificates.
We had 2 Aviator Silver Companion Certificates
My wife and I each have Aviator Silver credit cards and we each completed the $20K spend on our respective cards to earn a Companion Certificate. Each companion certificate could be used one time to bring up to two companions for $99 + tax per companion. This meant that if she and I both used our companion certificates on the same flight, we could essentially book for 6 total passengers, paying the full round trip price for two passengers and $99 + tax for four passengers.
It’s worth mentioning from the beginning that we completed that spend on our Aviator Silver cards knowing that we might not be be able to use the companion certificates at all. I was motivated in large part by the chance to write about whether we ultimately used the certificates and how easy or difficult they were to use. Especially given the high number of blackout dates on the certificates, I think it is hard to assign much value to these companion certificates from a speculative standpoint. That is to say that I wouldn’t spend $20K on an Aviator Silver card expecting to get much (or any) value out of the companion certificate simply because it’s hard to know in advance whether you’ll be able to find a use that fits the parameters and how much you’ll save when you do.
However, as I also noted above, in my own case, we ran into a perfect scenario where the certificates yielded big real-world savings.
A tight travel window and expensive flight options
The gist of our situation is that we had circumstances come up where we needed to travel from Albany, NY to Chicago, IL as a group of six on specific dates for a family event next month. Our schedule for this trip was very tight in terms of both fixed dates and times at both ends of the trip, needing to fly outbound around midday and preferring the same on the return. I’m ordinarily willing to leave a day or two earlier or to take a 6am flight if necessary in order to save a few bucks, but none of that was an option in this case. Partner award availability was nonexistent.
We initially considered flights on United that would have been $587 per passenger round trip despite the return leg getting back later than we’d like. With six passengers, the total price would have been $3,492 round trip. Note that the headline price below is $512, but that was for basic economy — we’d have been booking regular economy for $582 each.
That seemed like an insane amount of money for a short domestic trip, but the flight times fit our needs and I could use United Travel Bank credit to cover a chunk of the cost. Unfortunately, we would have to pay additional fees for any checked bags since neither my wife nor I have any status or credit cards with United Airlines.
Long-time readers know that my wife and I almost exclusively fly Southwest for domestic trips. I would have expected to fly Southwest in this case, but flight timing just didn’t work out. Southwest used to have a few daily nonstops from Albany to Chicago-Midway, but their schedule has been cut down to one nonstop and the timing of that flight didn’t work. We might have been able to make a connecting Southwest itinerary work on the outbound, flying home on a separate ticket, but the cost for six passengers would still have been north of $3,000 between cash and rewards.
Saving a ton with our Aviator Silver companion certificates
American Airlines had an itinerary that fit our needs even better than United, though it was similarly expensive for the mid-day flight times that were a priority in this case. At $568 round trip per passenger, the total for the six of us would have been $3,408.
This is where our companion certificates came up huge.
As I’d previously written in my “first impressions” post, one of the positives about the Aviator Silver Companion Certificates is that they are valid for use on the vast majority of economy class fare classes (they do not work on basic economy fares, but in this case the lowest fare class available was “Main Cabin” anyway).
I had wondered how difficult it might be to find six seats in qualifying fare classes, but given that so many fare classes qualify, I’m betting it probably isn’t hard to find a flight with qualifying fare classes. In fact, I checked a few different flights on our departure and return dates and all of them had plenty of seats in qualifying fare classes. Our outbound flight was in “V” class and our return in “L” class. I simply entered 6 passengers at AA.com to verify that these classes were available for purchase for everyone in our party.
Unfortunately, you can not book travel with a companion certificate on the website. Instead, you must call American Airlines. The certificate notes that “Reservations must be made by calling American Airlines Meeting Services at 800-433-1790”. Sure enough, when you call that number, one of the menu options is to book travel with a companion certificate.
I called over the weekend and it took around 10 minutes to reach a representative. Once I reached a rep and verified my account information, she was able to locate my certificate and read the restrictions. From there, it was just a matter of feeding her the flight information.
My ticket came out to $567.97 and each companion was $137.03 with taxes, for a total of $842.03 for three passengers.
My wife also used her certificate for her and our other two passengers and paid the same exact price, making the total out of pocket cost for six passengers about $1,684 — just under $281 round trip per passenger. That was about $1,700 less than the cost to buy these specific tickets from American and well over a thousand bucks less than our next best option. Getting more than $500 in value from each certificate is far more than I expected out of these, particularly given the blackout dates.
Speaking of blackout dates, both my phone rep and my wife’s rep carefully combed over the blackout dates on the certificate before searching for flights and both sounded surprised that our dates didn’t run up against the blackout dates (which makes sense given that we were looking at a weekend and so many weekends are blacked out).
The certificate says that you need to pay with your Aviator Silver card. I expected that to be required, so I was ready with that card, but I’m not positive that it wouldn’t have worked with any card. My phone rep didn’t mention any requirement to use it and just asked for a card number when it was time to pay. My wife’s representative did specifically ask for her Mastercard number. Your mileage may vary if you want to use a different card to pay.
The certificates say that you must book travel at least 48 hours in advance and I now know that is because the reservation isn’t completed immediately. At the end of the phone call, I had a confirmation code, but the agent explained that the certificate gets applied manually by a specific team, so it takes 24-48 hours to receive the email confirming that process is complete. Sure enough, it was about 48 hours before I received the email confirming that my companion certificate had been redeemed (note that I did receive an email receipt within a few hours of booking though).
Elite benefits apply
For those curious, I want to also confirm that my American Airlines benefits did apply to the booking. I currently have American Airlines Platinum status and as such I was able to select Main Cabin Extra (exit row) seats at booking. I’m sure we’ll also get priority boarding and free checked bags by virtue of our American Airlines credit cards.
I found the Main Cabin Extra seating particularly interesting because my Platinum status is set to expire at the end of this month, but this trip won’t occur until next month. I wouldn’t have expected to be able to access the Main Cabin Extra seating for a flight that occurs after my elite status expires, but I certainly won’t complain.
Bottom line
My wife and I recently booked travel using our American Airlines AAdvantage Aviator Silver Companion certificates, which we earned by each spending $20,000 in our previous cardmember year on our Aviator Silver credit cards. It was easier than expected for us to find availability, and “thanks” to incredibly high flight prices for the dates and times we needed to travel, the certificates saved us a lot of money. I still wouldn’t recommend that the average person spend toward these certificates given the large number of blackout dates, but my situation goes to show that a domestic economy class companion certificate certainly can be huge in the right situation.
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Wow! Buy a lottery ticket before your luck runs out.
Glad it worked out for you Nick!
Re: Main Cabin Extra seating — when booking an (Alaska miles) award ticket on AA for next year, i was able to select Main Cabin Extra seating due to my oneWorld Ruby status (again, due to Alaska status), which would expire at the end of this year. ie it seems AA looks at your current status for Main Cabin Extra seating, and doesn’t take future expiry into account.
Nick, I’m glad you were able to get great value of these certs!
I’ve an offer to upgrade to the Aviator Silver card. What’s the current information and your take on what’ll happen to this card once all AA cards come under the Citi umbrella?
Once booked, can you do a paid upgrade to first?
Good question. I have no idea — this is an all-economy-class aircraft, so I don’t and won’t know.
Thanks for the write up, I expect to earn a companion cert from my Citi AA biz card and possibly also aviator biz card. I’m not spending towards that goal, but for various reasons I end up putting a decent amount of spend through these cards. Will be interesting to see if I can make use of them, if so that will be very handy!
I just added a section because I forgot to mention that elite benefits did apply to my companions, which might be worth knowing since it sounds like you might spend enough to earn elite status also.
Good to know! Yes, I usually earn at least Plat Pro, and last year actually just squeaked into Exex Plat.
Great article Nick. You and the rest of the crew at FM are the reason I tell everyone interested in this hobby that FM is THE blog to follow. Your very candid and detailed articles are a pleasure to read, besides being highly informative. I know that podcasts are trending (and probably here to stay) but PLEASE remember that many people are just plain “readers” too and don’t have time for podcasts.
As you have noted in this post and prior posts the biggest issue with using these certs are the blackout dates. As long as the date is valid these work great, and are widely applicable. My wife and I are flying from Virginia to California to see our daughter next month. Saved almost $700 using this certificate. It’s my favorite one, compared to Delta (only certain specific fare codes qualify) or Alaska (limited East coast availability).
I had a similar situation happen to me a few weeks ago where I used AA Silver Certs to fly from San Antonio to Bakersfield, CA. The costs was in the high 400s so using these certificates saved me at least $600 in cash, and a flight from my home airport to the exact city and state I wanted to fly to.
Nick, great article! A few questions to get your POV when considering if it really was a “deal”. I am not trying to question your logic or challenge the savings, but just trying to understand how you look at certain things since I am in a similar boat where I am spending a lot of money (suboptimal earning rates) on Hyatt cards to earn Globalist
1. Did you track the cost of generating that $40k spend? I am sure you got LP and redeemable AA miles for that spend, but I would be surprised if all of that spend was organic and come at no additional cost to you in the form of fees that could have been avoided or below cost deals on buying groups, etc?
2. While you are right to compare your savings against next best and cheaper alternatives, would you even have paid cash for that alternative if you did not have companion certificates? I often find this question useful for my own analysis since i would almost always find an alternative option (no matter how challenging constraints are) if I did not have certain instruments? Perhaps you’d have paid a non ideal amount of points and convinced yourself that you got an “amazing value” out of those points? Or perhaps you’d have somehow found an extra day on either end of the trip or fly for a non convenient airport?
3. Given that this was an experiment in the first place, and given what you know now, would you spend $40k again this year to get these certificates next year?
Once again, great article and thanks for sharing the details. I am a big fan of your writing on this blog, and I’d appreciate your thoughts.
1) No. Frankly, I’m able to do a lot of spend every year. I don’t track the opportunity cost of every decision because there’s sufficient volume that I can earn a wide range of things. Additionally, since I write about this stuff, there’s intangible value in being able to write about it from first person experience. You are absolutely right to consider the opportunity cost if putting 20K spend on a card like this means you can’t put spend on another card, and that’s why I conclude that it probably isn’t worth it. But no, I didn’t track that.
2) Yes, in this case paying cash was the alternative. I mentioned in the post that parameters were tight. You’ll just have to take my word for it that coming back a day later or leaving a few hours earlier just wasn’t an option in this case and we were 100% going no matter the cost. In fact, I’ve mentioned many times before that my wife loves to travel but hates to fly and that we primarily fly Southwest domestically because she will not fly on a small plane. Those American Airlines flights are on E145s, so she was initially firmly opposed to the AA itinerary despite the cost savings. Everyone in the family understands the predicament, so we were about to spend the $600 each for the United flights when she stepped up and changed her mind and said that she would do the American flights. I definitely wouldn’t have used an outrageous number of points. As much as it would have pained me to spend $600 per person for a short domestic economy round-trip flight, it would pain me far more to use a quantity of miles for it that could have bought me a business class ticket to Europe. If there were partner availability, I would have absolutely been happy to book United through Air Canada or American through Alaska, but the flight times we needed were not available through partners. In this case, ORD actually is the alternative airport to make it cheaper and faster than connecting to where we are actually going. There was no flexibility for a different departing airport because of scheduling. We have to be home in the morning on the day of departure and the next closest airport is more than 2 and 1/2 hours away, so it wasn’t possible to get to an alternative airport in time. Trust me, my wife had less than zero interest in the American Eagle flights, so I explored every option.
3) No, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t. As I concluded in the post, I wouldn’t do the spend for the certificate with the expectation of saving this much twice. But I have the capacity for a lot of spending and I don’t want to cycle credit limits, so I have room to put purchases on these Aviator cards that isn’t coming at the full opportunity cost you’re imagining. If I spend some money through the shopping portal and I’m within reach of a level of elite status anyway, maybe I’ll put 20K spend on these cards to earn the 5K loyalty point bonus and the certificate and the 20K miles, but I’m not making any claim that that’s a slam dunk nor that anyone else should be doing it. And because we normally have so much flexibility, the chances of me getting this type of value out of the certificate is much lower since I normally can just fly home a day later or take a cheaper flight or use partner miles on another airline. Take the blackout dates on top of that and I think it becomes a lot harder yet to justify spending toward this carrot. Like in this instance, if we could have left a few hours earlier or returned a day later, the potential savings would have been significantly lower. For me, the chances of being in a situation we’re doing those things is not an option and American has the itinerary I want and it’s not during the blackout dates feels limited. Furthermore, if we had that flexibility this time around, maybe the more limited savings would have made me want to save my certificate in case there were a better use that came along – but then that runs the risk of breakage since there’s no telling whether I’ll have another use case or not. I got great value here, It literally saved family members traveling with us almost $300 a passenger, but I’m still not a big believer in these certs.
Thanks Nick for such a detailed and immediate response. That’s one of the many things I appreciate about you and this blog. And it’s great that you are able to generate so much spend without much opportunity cost in terms of additional costs.