Originally Posted by ILUVCITIBANK
oh, and you really thought your family of five could travel on 25K awards - on the same plane
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I have personally used USAA's eagle points program, 2 months ago, and it works wondrously well and offers reasonable to excellent flexibility. I now accumulate about 35,000 eagle points a mo average (for 2004), second only behind my starwood/spg accumulation rate. Citibank/AAdvantage will now, starting 2 mo ago, lose as much as 150,000 a month of my charging business, forever.
There you have it: it depends a LOT on your circumstances, and you've just mentioned a big one that's rarely mentioned here: Because so many airlines only release a couple award seats at a time, it's always trickier getting award seats for many people on the same plane than award seats for just one or two. THAT ALONE can make a complete difference in how you and someone else views a program!
Meanwhile, the same thing could befall the "fake miles" programs, but for a different reason: "Hello, I'd like to redeem for 5 tickets from AAA to BBB in 24 days." "Well, we can only give you two tickets on airline QQ because if I try 3 tickets there it comes out well over $300 per ticket, and only three on airline ZZ because of the same problem. Would you like to split the group up between airline QQ and airline ZZ?" See, the "fake miles" programs only let you get tickets from deep discount buckets, and on high-demand iteneraries, more than 21 days out there STILL might not be 5 seats all on one plane at those deep discount levels. (And the airlines can, and at least in some cases do, do the same thing with paid tickets as with awards: Only release a few at a time, so the deep discount ticket bucket inventory can go up and down and up and down. This is easy to see if you use something like Availability Tool to research buckets for the same flight over hours and days.)
As to your latter point, I and several other people have already mentioned it in this thread: You're likely to like "fake miles" cards a lot more if you spend oodles each month (presumably because you have high business expenses), but if you're a mere mortal consumer who has no business expenses and can't even pay your rent or mortgage by credit card (or at least not without losing way more in fee than you earn in the value of miles/points), your ability to turn over awards every few months may well be limited. and in that case the inability to "pool" miles/points from multiple sources may start becoming a factor, and the danger of the program disappearing or greatly changing with "just" a few months notice becomes an issue of importance (because you don't earn enough for even ONE award in "just" a few months!).