Originally Posted by
sktn77a
In March, I flew across country. 50,000 first class round trip. Plenty of options in terms of available flights. Today I tried to book the same flights. Plenty of options in terms of available flight but the price went up to 100,000 miles. .... Time to dump the American and its DIS-AAdvantage program after over 40 years!
A 3 million mile program member.
So....one failed attempt to find a good flight and that's it...you're writing off the program?
If you're a 3 million miler, you've been through a lot of ebbs and flows with AAdvantage. I remember years when AA was *the* leader - by far - in terms of availability and ease of booking. I also remember that you couldn't do one-way awards and you had very little flexibility once an award was ticketed, even as a Platinum.
As a regular user of AA, UA, AS, and BA miles, AA still has some really good sweet spots, along with areas where it's a poor value.
These days F/J travel is often *very* expensive as an AA award - although on occasionally, comparatively cheap as a revenue ticket. But at the same time, booking 4+ tickets in Y for family trips is actually a bit easier that it has been for most of my flying life. I just booked 4x MCI-ATH for next year's Spring Break at 22,500 miles one-way per person. In some past years, even finding the simple MCI-ORD portion was impossible on the peak Spring Break dates. Long-haul is on AA, so no bogus BA fees.
It's been better...it's been worse. The game evolves. You just have to be willing to evolve with it.