What do you mean by "comparable value?" In my example of FC travel to Australia on QF, what's comparable? Would it be an international award to somewhere in FC whose full fare is around $13,000+ for 135,000 miles? Or, would it be specifically a FC award to Australia?

If the latter, how would this work in practice? Unless AA and QF had an agreement which allowed AA to purchase QF award inventory at whatever their internal oneworld pricing was indefiniately in the future, even if oneworld falls apart, I don't see how AA could do this. Even such an agreement from QF wouldn't be a total proctection from a situation such as QF discontinuing service to the US.

Certainly you don't expect them to be in a position to actually buy a $13,000+ ticket from some other airline in return for 135,000 miles? Or, would other airlines forced to accept an alliance contracted FF rate from a non-partner? Such a law would indeed provide great protection to the consumer. The problem is that no airline would offer the award in the first place if it meant taking on such a huge future potential liability.

Don't get me wrong: I do think the airlines have at least a moral obligation to us to not make sweeping changes with no notice. In fact, I think that many airlines' programs have in their own rules that they must provide notice of a certain amount before changes such as this are implemented, and I think that's a good thing.

One of the points I was trying to make is that for a lot of us, the mileage redemption levels are secondary to the route maps and especially the partner airlines. Using myself as an example, I accumulate most of my credit card miles on AA and not my usual carrier because of the wonderful selection of AAdvantage partner airlines, including oneworld. If that were to go away, my accumulated AAdvantage miles would be devalued around 75% in their worth to me. This would be much more serious to me than a minor increase in redemption requirements.

In fact, OZ is leaving AAdvantage as of Dec 31, and that was one of the carriers I was planning on getting an award on someday. I just don't see how AA could be forced to grandfather me into the all the existing AAdvantage awards in the face of such a change. I wish it were otherwise, but it's not.

[This message has been edited by Steve M (edited 12-29-2002).]