Originally Posted by
swag
I'd argue that they've already increased the number of miles required for awards or upgrades.
Oh, sure the mileage chart for the Saaver awards may look the same, but there's way less availability than there used to be. Add the multi-tier AAnytime awards and the near-complete absence of non-surcharged premium awards to Europe, and your award travel is likely costing you more miles or cash than it did just a few years ago. If that's not devaluation, I don't know what is.
I echo that sentiment - once they "connected" the networks using codeshares from January to March, the next thing they did is implement a different structure with 5 levels of awards - on both sides - supposedly to synchronize the programs and they removed some very neat features of AAdvantage - no more free stopover on NA awards - I loved that. And the oneworld explorer awards - which I never used but can see how they could have been useful. Also, DM members still had to redeem for round-trip travel even if they didn't necessarily want to. They chose not to align that in the programs. So, clearly a devaluation already took place in both programs. Thus, I've parked quite a lot of miles in Dividend Miles and am waiting for them to become AAdvantage miles to use on one-way awards. And am currently working on depleting my AA miles. I have a huge exposure to any further devaluation of the programs as my combined balance will be over 400,000 miles, which will take a while to use up.