Funny enough I close my card yesterday to avoid the pending $75 annual fee and just applied for the 40k mile bonus $100 statement credit (covers the $75 annual fee) and was approved - so got a new companion fare coming and avoided the annual fee ;)

That seems to be a decent play..

I absolutely loathe Skank of America and have only kept two of their cards because of the companion fares. I always found them useful, but more often than not needed to make changes closer in. The AS constant schedule changes never helped. Now, with this change, I will be closing both cards. I keep them at $0.00 balance, so it will be nice to give BofA ( or more clearly SofA) the nose thumb as I walk away.

Interesting. I had renewals come up in August. Had I known we'd still be in this mess I might have just cancelled then. I have zero interest in flying right now. I just had to do a trip 6 hrs away and drove and spent time in a hotel and it was not the best experience. Not going to fly over some coupon and do this.

Move on
 

IMO neither AS or BofA gives a hoot if you cancel your card so you might as well do it and move on. My DW and I have 3 cards and we're cancelling one because they bring little value. Some folks who fly AS a lot DO get value from the CF cert but the infrequent flyer won't. Watch the sales and use those instead. :)

Did this years ago. Most of my travel doesn't end up lining up perfectly with people even if a group trip (i.e. slightly different departure/return dates, or meeting someone coming from a different city), so found it chore to use the companion cert on something that gave me good value. The card isn't particularly rewarding for purchases (even AS purchases you can get better rewards with other cards), and the fact that there was no flexibility on the companion cert (i.e. companion flies free *or* $50 off a solo traveler ticket) made me cancel. Have never looked back.

yup.. I booked SFO - HNL for March using the companion fare, $384 for two. Then I saw the BOGO promo earlier this week where two tix SFO - HNL in late March priced at ~$200.

definitely closing the bofa card after I use up my companion fare

Are you using a companion certificate for a one-way SFO-HNL? It would be very difficult to extract any value on an itineray with one segment.

"Going in circles" offers a better yield. We just completed an itinerary of 8,502 miles (not a mileage run) and saved $457 off of the base fare. With taxes, average cost per flight was $71.46 each and together we earned 36,134 RDM. I booked us an award MSY-SEA-PHX//PHX-PVR with a 5 week stopover in PHX for 17.5K each offsetting a base fare greater than the original itinerary.

James

round trip

Unprecedented fares in Unprecedented times. $50 each, each way certainly trumps the companion certificate. My first ever flight, a 737-100 for a 35 minute flight was $29 in 1969. :D

James