jd20

They might. I think I have award availability for the whole year (broken down by Saver, Choice, etc...), both before and after the website revamp, so I could run the numbers and see how it changed. Only for SFO-HKG though, that's the only route I fly

percysmith

New AM math
Need to reduce cost of miles from $0.06 (NZ ticket: $10,800 plus domestic plus taxes) to $0.04 ($7,200 +dom +tax)

Assume spending can be sold @98
Earn needed per $100 spent
@0.06 = 33.33 AM or better
--> @0.04 = 50 AM or better

Earn rate needed = $2/AM OR BETTER

Bankcomm: need 6X or better
CCB: 939 Apple Pay & online OK, general spend marginally not


Postscript 7/7: if i value both new earn and burn at $0.04 I am tempted to burn my existing stock too quickly.

I wonder should I implement a spread for 12 months:

Buy: $0.04
Burn (for comparison with revenue fares like above): $0.06?

So I don't undervalue cost of new awards and redeem too many Choice/Tailored?

focusonskills

It's showing on both BA and QF website, but I don't have enough miles in account to see if it's bookable. It's not a single case as I found multiple dates with availability on BA/QF but not on AM.

rickywk

Sounds great, let us see the difference and see what's better to the next step.
I afraid CX may increase tons of HKG TPE redeem-able seats to bump up so called 20% awards seats...

rickywk

https://www.asiamiles.com/en/media-c...more-rewarding

The news release by AM only said 20% or more rewards seats, but no foot note to said how to compare old and new. It's very interesting to see whether HK Customs dept. how to responds complaints.

hightide

Are J space for LAX-HKG generally more scare than SFO-HKG throughout the year? For late March, I couldn't find LAX-HKG but found many available dates for SFO-HKG.

Is it because LAX is AA's hub hence more people connect between AA-CX at LAX?

MileageGoblin

No. There is an AA metal LAX-HKG. LAX just has more C traffic than SFO and O&Ds prefer CX over AA.

jd20

I pulled the numbers I had on CX award availability, both before and after the new site rollout. Unfortunately, it's mostly bad news. I don't know how to insert a table here, so a screenshot will have to do:



First, a note on how this was calculated: I had award inventory for CX F for 5/10/2018 - 12/31/2018, collected on 5/6. CX shows business award availability for flights with no F cabin, so the C (business) awards are for those flights only (there could be more C awards if I'd searched specifically for business). The "After" data was collected mostly on 6/27, for dates of 7/1/2018 - 12/31/2018. So there's about a 6 month overlap (7/1 - 12/31) which is what's being reported in the table above. To keep things simple, I'm ignoring quantity (so whether there's 1 or 2 First Saver awards available on one flight, it's counted as just 1).

I didn't look at Econ / Prem. Econ, because I don't have that data. Maybe their claim of 20% more econ awards is true, beats me. I really only pay attention to FS+ and CS+, and both of those are down significantly

jd20

For those more visual people, here's a chart comparison of CX F award availability:



SFO-HKG First Awards (Old on left, New on right)

Last minute availability for 1 week out is improved, but overall much less inventory. The good news is, if you look out about 6 months, "First Standard" availability is pretty decent. There's considerably more "Business Choice" availability for next 60 days too, which wasn't there before. If you mainly redeem far out in advance, or at the very last minute, maybe these changes are positive for you (and I'm just extrapolating, based on SFO-HKG, I haven't looked in detail at other routes).



First / Business award availability: Jul 2018 - Jul 2019

ermen

So looks like CX is now severely restricting award seats outport to HKG to partners? Or is this a temporary IT gltich?

e.g.
Example 1
PER - HKG plenty of seats on AM over the next few weeks (e.g. 16 Jul close in). But nothing on BAEC
BUT - if i add in say an onward segment (e.g PER-xHKG-TPE), availability opens up?

Example 2
SIN-HKG plenty of seats on AM on 5 Jan 2019. Nothing on BAEC
Again, if I add SIN-xHKG-TPE, availability opens up again...

You may argue its a married segment issue (maybe). But highly doubt it because seats are wide open on AM. Unless its a conscious choice to limit outport-HKG sectors to AM only?

Would be interested to see if I can get a seat PER-HKG if I call up BAEC.

percysmith

Postscript 7/7: if i value both new earn and burn at $0.04 I am tempted to burn my existing stock too quickly.

I wonder should I implement a spread for 12 months:

Buy: $0.04
Burn (for comparison with revenue fares like above): $0.06?

So I don't undervalue cost of new awards and redeem too many Choice/Tailored?

rickywk

I thinks there 20% more claim is related to #@%$ing choice and tailor category, and also HKG TPE this ultra short routes.
Those popular destination just put it to choice and tailor category until very last minutes

jd20

Or maybe increased economy award availability, because even F/C choice and tailored availability is mostly flat or down.

Another odd thing, I've not seen a single F tailored award available when searching the SFO-HKG route (that's the row that's -100% in the table). I wasn't sure if that's a glitch on the AM website, or is F tailored something you need to call to book? Very strange...

percysmith

Here's the problem - if everyone's first impression of the post-22/6 program is lower availability at acceptable rates, how can CX turn that around?

Even if they start making more Standard seats available tomorrow, we won't believe them (they already made the 20% claim once).

I think their only solution (if they want a solution, as opposed to letting the program zombie-die and selling seats at elong for hundreds of RMB) is to invent more categories of awards and make new promises of availability there.

Probably start at either "Saver" or "Value" to replace Standard

Nicc HK

MPC is certainly close to completely losing all its utility to me as a FFP programme with the latest changes. Since moving to AA I have only been crediting my CC miles which in the past covered two regional flights each year, namely 1 to Japan (with the internal Japan stopover) and 1 to KUL/SIN. I also book at relatively short notice.

So having read the above I did a quick search on a very random and unscientific basis for August 2018 (Dates covered 3/8 to 23/8). Deliberately looked at midweek as well as weekend flights.

1. Could only find Economy Tailored as the baseline for TYO/KUL routes which was 20K one way for each. Also only saw business or first tailored for the dates I was looking at as well.
2. Also searched Bankok, same thing, 40K for an economy return to Bangkok??????????
3. Manila no problem, 15K for a return
4. The old Japan stopover option has gone with the one way pricing.

Ominously, it also looks as if MPC has set itself up for dynamic pricing for the tailored awards, from the Asia Miles website: