Airline Loyalty

It's the season for status match opportunities right now as yet another loyalty program takes to Twitter to offer status matches to elite members in other programs. Recently we've seen Hyatt matching to their top tier Diamond status and Hilton following suit shortly after, and now Virgin America has sent out a tweet reminding travelers that they're happy to match status from competing airlines to their Elevate loyalty program.

UPDATE: British Airways Executive Club members based in the UK have slightly cheaper options available to them. As the UK doesn't charge taxes on...

Avianca's LifeMiles program has been selling miles in ever increasing quantities recently and, while its very tempting to snap up miles at a cheap rate when you can, there's a reason why I'm not ready to dive in just yet.

A couple of days ago I published a post discussing how the recently announced changes to the AAdvantage Program would affect award redemptions by European based AAdvantage members (American Airlines AAdvantage Award Chart Devaluations – Euro Travelers’ Viewpoint) and it wasn't pretty. In this post I'm going to show how the changes to how we earn redeemable miles, being introduced from late 2016, makes everything doubly bad. Yep, I'm full of good news this week!

This week saw a massive devaluation to the American Airlines AAdvantage program and, with the changes to the award charts being as welcome as a bout of botulism, you may be wondering why I'm writing a post about purchasing AAdvantage Miles. Bear with me and I'll explain why.

Sometimes I can't catch a break - I take two days out to do something other than watching what the various loyalty programs, airlines and hotel chains are doing and then Marriott goes and buys Starwood and American Airlines announces an enormous award chart devaluation. That last one was the worst because the announcement came while I was at 34,000ft somewhere over Europe (and without WiFi access) and I only saw the news when I landed back at Heathrow (very late at night). Airlines really don't consider miles & points bloggers when they release their news! :)

News of a targeted "purchase miles" offer from United Airlines MileagePlus that's appearing in the latest MilagePlus statements that were sent out yesterday and today. It looks like the bonuses on offer will vary from person to person with the best offer (so far) being an 80% bonus on purchases of between 40,000 and 80,000 miles.

Over the past 18 months EasyJet has been trialling, what they're calling, a new recognition scheme and it appears that they're now ready to roll it out in full. "Flight Club" will launch in early 2016 and will be very different from the regular airline loyalty programs we're used to.

Thanks to JonNYC over at the travelingbetter forums we now know a lot more about what to expect from American Airlines and AAdvantage in 2016. Bear in mind that absolutely none of this has been officially announced but Jon has long been a very good source of accurate information so there's every reason to believe that what we're hearing is correct.

Afee denying everything back in September when they accidentally let slip their new earnings chart for flights on British Airways, American Airlines has, today, published the exact same chart on the their website - only this time they're not claiming it's a mistake.