Does the date of joining the program matter?
 

I joined AAdvantage back in May 09 and have flown over 100,000 miles since then.

Last week I was going through some old letters and found that I was a member back in 1995, as my parents flew on a AA flight to see my grandparents for the summer.

If I use the older # from 1995 help me in preference in anyway?

Also can they transfer all of my info and stats to the older account?

They are both my accounts.

I don't think it makes any difference at all, but they do show the join date on aa.com so if you're nostalgic it may be worth asking to consolidate to the older account. Mine says Thursday October 29, 1981. Why Thursday matters, or the date, I don't know but AA certainly does not want us to forget. There's even a thread somewhere on this forum comparing ancient AAdvantage numbers and formats.

If you joined early enough (like jbcarioca and I did), your AAdvantage number is really a number, not numbers and letters. If you run into really old AAgents (in person or on the telephone), they recognize what a purely numeric number means, and they are impressed. It doesn't really get me anything extra, but it is kinda neat.

Your 1995 joining was much too late, you would have an alphanumeric number.

It most likely will make no difference. You can however call and have them "merge" the accounts and the older date will show as your join date.

If you merge the accounts, don't your program totals also get merged?

call aadvantage cs, if you have any mi's that haven't expired [don't remember the dates], merge the accounts....good luck....

Good point. That could be an AAdvantage.

As mentioned above, your PTD (program to date AKA lifetime) miles will get merged too. Definitely do it.

A decade ago, AA celebrated the 20th anniversary of the AAdvantage program by giving original members a 20K mile gift.

That's the only case I can think of that join date mattered.

Merging accounts moves you closer to lifetime status. Even though the miles may be gone from the old account due to inactivity, they still count toward your lifetime total.

For the 25th anniversary of the AAdvantage Program, Avis offered additional bonus miles for rentals based upon how long you've been an AAdvantage Member:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ameri...ary-promo.html

I'm hoping AAdvantage will offer some wicked awesome bonuses for the 30th anniversary of the AAdvantage program in May 2011. :D

I completely forgot about those, maybe I have been flying AA too much for too long. Well, we can hope they do something again. I wish they did something other than luggage tags and eVIPs for extra millions of miles.

Where do you see this information? For some reason, my aa.com defaults to Chile (although I am in Rio) and I see no such information.

Of course, it also means that we are really old. :eek:

And if you do merge the accounts, get those old miles back by doing a reengagement challenge:

http://www.flyerguide.com/wiki/index...ment_Challenge