Originally Posted by
JonNYC
I had heard over year ago from a former very, very high AAdv source something along the lines of (paraphrasing) "..and member would pay for the flights they use" but that was during a conversation about "customer must use most direct routing" on partner flex awards and how/if that rule intermingled with carrier published fares requirement so I never for a second thought it was making any reference whatsoever to eliminating Explorer awards.
Looking back at the email exchange, I can see that maybe there were -some- signs there that AA was definitely planning on coming much closer to "the fewer flights per award the better"-- it's kind of all there in a sense.
But, at the end of it, I personally never heard any credible rumors of elimination of Explorer awards whatsoever.
Thanks for answering. I actually thought AA would just increase miles required for redeeming this awards. Who would have thought that it was completely gutted. I read somewhere that AA eliminated OW Explorer award was because not many actually redeemed this type of award. This could well be true. I used to get agents telling me that they had not seen routing or awards like this.
This type of award were not easy to pull together. Had I not benefited from FT knowledge, I would have gone nowhere.
Is there any other similar award among other OW carriers?