flyer4512

March and not to say I don't have faith but the next day I'm scheduled on Southwest, lol

Jaunts

That's one of the ironies here. 150K miles doesn't necessarily buy much on AA anymore unless you get a web special with no flexibility and leave at 5 am on a Tuesday. Especially when looking at the major tourism spots, miles don't seem to be worth much now.

I just did a search for travel from the US to Europe on points for July. If a family wanted to redeem points to Europe, it could cost them 150K or more per ticket round trip in coach. If they wanted to fly business class, it could cost a family of 4 a million AA miles or more to do that.

Several of the posters in this thread have mentioned losing hundreds of thousands or even millions of miles with account closures. That actually makes more sense with what I just saw. I was aware that people did this. I had seen the threads before. But sense it wasn't something I chose to do, I wasn't aware of the scale necessary to pay for a family's international travel with points. People have to have huge mileage balances to travel now. A million miles for one trip seems like a lot to me.

I just looked at a first class ticket to LHR in July, and the AA website showed 650K miles plus over $200 in fees for one ticket. Yikes! That's a lot! I'm glad my company pays for my international travel...

Global321

Disagree.

RT to Europe in business for 115k
RT to Tokyo for 120k.
RT to SE Asia in business for 140k.

While availability is not great on AA, with partners there are flights to be had.

notquiteaff

Basically, unless you are manufacturing miles by the bucket load, just consider those awards to be the same as “no Saver availability” in the olden days and move on.

I haven’t booked or shopped for tickets with AA miles recently, but in 2019 I flew

SEA-EBB-SEA - 150k on mostly Qatar J, got two of those RTs, so 300k miles
SEA-FRA - 57.5k on mostly AA J

I don’t have to fly a family of 4 to Europe during summer vacations, but those trips above required no flexibility from me. I realize that I won’t always be able to get the award I want when I need it, but diversifying across programs helps, too. The return from FRA was on Emirates with AS miles, for example. So I am not to worried that my remaining 400k AA miles won’t be useful anymore, just like I have found good uses for my DL Sky “pesos”.

Often1

Consider that if the churners (or some significant number of them) are given the boot (by AA) and AA leaves award inventory at the same levels, dynamic pricing will push the cost of an award down. By how much will depend on the number of churners and number of miles taken off the market.

azepine00

Hahaha - this naive point of view never stops to amuse me...

IkeEsq

This presumes it was reasonable to think that AA would randomly decide to shutdown accounts because Citi gave away too many miles. Everyone expected Citi to shutdown mailers. No one expected AA to shutdown accounts.

Robl

Yup it was thought here https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/amer...l#post30311594
that Centurian Lounge overcrowding was due to free Ameriprise Platinum cardholders. Well that card was eliminated with no effect on the overcrowing issue.

Often1

Which has what to do with AA with fluid availability such as mileage tickets?

xyzxyzxyz

All too true. Let's say you want to fly US-TATL next fall. I'll leave out Economy, because if that's all you want, just get a cash back card, put all of your natural spend on it, and use the cash back to buy a sale fare, middle of 10 seats across, multi-connection ticket on a LCC. Of course if you do that, you'll spend the first week of your trip in a total fog, due to "cattle class exhaustion"; but as they say, 'beggars can't be choosers'.

So let's talk Business class. To maximize your vacation time, and minimize your missed work days, you need to fly to Europe on Saturday, and return on Sunday. First of all, there is no Saver availability any day of the week on AA metal; NONE. The lowest award price outbound on Saturday is 180K. Some days it's as high as 400K, but if as they say your dates are 'flexible' you can find 180K on a Saturday.

The lowest Sunday return is 300K. You don't want to leave your SO home alone. So a pair of J R/T tickets will price at just short of a MILLION miles. With the current AA cc SUB being 50K, allowed once every 2 years, it will take @20 years to save up that amount of miles. Assuming of course that both of you get an AA card every two years. If you have a moderate amount of paid AA travel, you might get that down to 18 years.

Except AA has been @doubling the number of miles required for an award every year or so. Meaning by the time you each get those 500K miles, a single R/T TATL award will now price at @2 Million miles. Yes, the faster you run, the further behind you get.

No point in even bothering with the disAAdvantage program unless you are a "true road warrior", with company paid International travel 50 times a year. In which case the last thing you want to do with your vacation time is take another International flight. Or of course, if you are churning fast and furiously. That's why we did it in the first place. It was 'churn or stay home' for those of us who can't spend the nearly $10,000 a pair of J TATL tickets cost even when they are on 'sale'.

One of these days the low information people who signed up 5 years ago, and are working to get the 100K miles it used to take for a R/T J TATL Saver award are going to find out that they have a better chance of winning the state lottery than of getting the ever increasing number of miles that "once in a lifetime" European trip requires. AA is counting on the clueless folks who don't know better to keep buying miles "on sale", and paying extra to fly AA instead of taking a cheaper LCC when they need to fly domestically, hoping to get enough miles for a TATL award ticket, to keep this dishonest game going. The last thing they needed was the news stories about the shut downs to cause the non-churners to wonder "how miles does it take now to go to".....?

If the Muggles ever wake up and find out that playing the FF game the way the airlines want you to play it is a fools game, that will be the end of FF programs. AA, which only makes a profit on selling miles, should not be doing anything to wake those folks up....

Global321

So many things wrong with this post.
1) You can find tickets at saver on AA partners most of the time if you do some pre-planning. (I saw lots of dates this summer at saver award to various EU destinations. Just buy a cheap coach to your destination.)
2) A million to 2 million miles for a flight is just absurd.
3) $10k for TATL - $2k RT can be found most of the time, some times 1k with La Compagnie. (High season - June - NYC to Paris, ~$2k right now.)

At the end of the day, this is what it comes down to... people churned/abused the system, took their shot, got caught and now the miles/accounts are revoked. Some churners have the right attitude... 'oh well, move on to the next churn'. Justifying the action seems a little hollow. Not attacking anyone. Nothing personal to anyone. It is what it is.

Adelphos

A lot of hyperbole here

1) Most redemptions are domestic and always have been
2) There are round trip business class redemptions available to Europe in March for I believe under 100K as “web specials.” You can still go to Japan for 120K miles RT in business on miles pretty easily.
3) Very few people buy miles directly
4) LCC aren’t meaningfully less expensive than legacy carriers on my routes

tom911

So are you spending any cash with AA, or relying solely on miles accrued with credit card applications for your travel?

Robl

People claim that with churners gone F award tickets will now be available.

Adelphos

AA is in an interesting position in that they don’t participate in any transferable credit card programs and their cards earn at most 2 miles per dollar spent. In contrast you can earn up to 3 United miles per dollar with Chase cards and up to 5 Delta miles per dollar with Amex cards. In addition people don’t have the option of spending on an SPG card and transferring to AA anymore. So theoretically there should be fewer AA miles in circulation over time relative to United and Delta. Not sure how
that will impact availability or pricing