QRC3288

This change makes AM devalued for me. I use Asia Miles primarily as a way to discount LH premium class flying. Pay for premium or buy M and use miles to upgrade. I do most of my flying for business purposes, and admittedly I generally plan on flying in the premium class - I buy M strictly to lower my cash outlay and ensure a date when I get the mileage upgrade. Naturally, my schedule changes. And, the underlying fare class (be it M or one of the biz class fares) allows free schedule changes. However, because I'm really using M fare + miles as a way every few flights to discount J flying (or biz fare + miles to get to F), awards become less valuable to me. That's because I'll often change my flights 3-4x before the actual flight date. I don't consider this abuse of CX's system, although maybe they do. I change schedules because meetings pop up and I need flexibility. On a recent round-trip I think I changed each sector 3x. So that'd be 6x changes, which would amount to $150. None of the changes were significant, but it would be say flying out 12 hours later than before. Things like that. I'm one of those travelers who really enjoys having multiple frequencies to the destinations I travel to.

I'm not sure the way I use tix is the way CX intended (aka, biz travelers using miles), but I just don't use mileage for holidays because I don't often take holidays. Every trip inevitably has something to do with business. So I use mileage just as a way to discount my flying. CX is now basically nudging us towards making our mileage-burning trips in advance (which is a hallmark of holiday travel), lest awards get more costly for those of us who demand more scheduling flexibility. Which basically punishes business travelers like myself who use mileage for business purposes.

My usual reaction to when a business is charging more $ for my good, they're full of BS. I understand their argument but I'm sure there's more to the story...aka these are fees that we'll simply have to pay because we're locked into AM. And the truth is, I'm guessing I'll just have to suck it up and pay it. I really hope there is some kind of reprieve for members, maybe SL, GO or DM or something like that. My biggest issue is I'm just racking up a lot of miles and have fewer and fewer outlets to use them. I suspect the net result here is that I'll just book less tickets that I plan to upgrade with miles on.

I don't like to burn mileage tickets outright because there is always the chance I can't get on the plane when the inevitable schedule change pops up. The last 5 days...literally there were almost zero business seats available JFK-HKG. So I can't afford to have the issue where I can't get on the plane, with my only option being to pay 7k or whatever a one-way JFK-HKG is in J class where I can get 24 hour guarantee. Whereas if you do have an underlying cash booking underneath (say M fare or J fare using miles to upgrade...as a DM, I have a confirmed seat 24 hours out), at least you know you're getting on the plane if you need to change schedules, just you won't get the upgrade. And with the introduction of premium economy, I only need 30k miles to upgrade from M to J class. Which I could do for a very very long time and not run out of miles! Ugh. I probably will end up just using mileage on family members in this case. Not a huge problem, but it would be nice if I could use them for myself too.