<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by ermdjdsf:
To the AA advocates:
How hard is it to use miles on AA to upgrade on international flights, especially from cheaper fares? One of my big gripes about NW is the great difficulty there is in finding upgradable fares as much as 11+ months ahead of time, especially if you're going anywhere people like to go for leisure (e.g., Europe in the summer).
What is the biggest DOWN side to AA?</font>
I moved from DL to AA a few years ago and have been a happy camper since. I have had no trouble upgrading cheap fares with miles, though you may already know that it takes 25,000 miles each way to upgrade discount economy to business whereas you can upgrade full-fare economy for only 10,000 miles.
The biggest downside, as I see it, is the concern that AA may follow DL and others and make discount economy travel much worse from a mileage- and status-earning point of view. This is already the case when you fly with some of their oneWorld partners. In general, things have gone downhill somewhat in the past couple of years as regards FF benefits, but where haven't they?