As I’ve already covered, a lot is changing at Alaska Mileage Plan. The program is making elite status easier to earn (including counting award flights toward status), and is also introducing new milestone perks (allowing members to customize their elite perks).
Continue reading: Alaska Mileage Plan Multi-Carrier Award Redemptions: Coming Soon
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
Unless there is any award availability released to AS, then this is lipstick on a pig. One can only hope that more awards are made available, though availability (or lack thereof) isn't always going to be AS's decision, as partners seem to be making awards less plentiful as well.
They need to waive the partner award booking fee of $12.50 for MVPG 100k, fix their broken award upgrade processor, and have more premium awards available. None of these “enhancements” are things that would make me keep my business with them.
Nowhere is this as evident as trying to get award redemptions across the Pacific...especially in J!
I got excited for a second and thought Alaska was going to offer RTWs the way Cathay does multi-carrier awards.
But this is technically a first step. It would be huge for Alaska to offer this.
All this is going in a better direction for the alaska air award traveler, I'd say as the dynamic pricing has raised ticket cost 50% at a minimum and 400% most cases as was 50,000 to Asia on cathay its now 85 but never available up to 250k and my biggest complaint is that all the foriegn partners get 30 days of booking access for bookings 360 days out over us alaska mileage users 330 days out which is grossly unfair
Tough to find awards. Also the last to open award calendar compared to say flyingblue
It's actually a US airline thing, all airlines Delta, UA, AA, B6, Alaska all have the shorter booking windows, it's rather unfortunate