You Can Now Earn Alaska Miles For Travel On Aer Lingus

ugh SQ situation again.
the gripe of MileagePlan is that their new partners seem to conveniently "miss" quite a few economy fare classes. Look at their SQ crediting page, only the most expensive buckets credit to AS, the rest do not show up at all, and it seems like Aer Lingus may be another one, as I feel there should be more than 4 discount economy buckets.
Hope I am wrong though.

Thanks for the good news! I like Aer Lingus' business class product and it will be a great way to earn AS miles and keep AS status. Now I just wish Hong Kong Airlines will become an Alaska Airlines' Mileage Plan partner soon. That will be perfect!

My tier status is with Alaska so this is great news. It will give me another option for trips to the UK rather than British Air horribly overpriced and underperforming business class.

AS should now start looking into partnering with the third IAG member, IB!

Also, kinda off topic, when AS partners with a new airlines, I really wish they would include any of the new airlines' subsidiaries. This would increase the amount of routes AS members can earn and redeem miles on. The fact that they do not this this is an annoyance. Not huge enough that it'd make me switch flying/earning on AS, but still. It's annoying that I can fly CX F to HKG and then not be able to connect to another city since the route is operated by KA.

The scaling back of the AS-AA partnership is quite problematic for anyone wanting to build/maintain their status with MileagePlan but also not wanting to spend an absolute fortune.

For example, flying to anywhere that involves an AS codeshare on AA metal within the US is over twice as expensive as flying on AA (or DL for that matter). This makes me a sad panda.

Partner, schmartner. Come on, Alaska, get off your frozen butt.

I'm becoming a bit skeptical about how AS actually "partners" with some if its "partners." AeroMexico, for example, was unusable as a partner for redemptions for over two years before AS finally admitted they were parting ways with them. Finnair supposedly became a partner last year. Yet, that partnership has been at best a one-way street. Now it look slike Aer Lingus is getting the same treatment.

I'd love to have real partners in Finnair and Aer Lingus, but until AS publishes an award chart for those airlines, and it actually becomes possible to redeem AS miles on those partners, this looks more like a bait-and-switch than a true partner to me.

This is better than the situation with American where Aer Lingus flights show up on the AA site search and can be booked, but you earn no AA miles at all.

I wish Alaska, JetBlue, Southwest or some domestic carrier makes a partnership with Norwegian.

AS just integrated VX into their system less than a month ago. It doesn't make much sense putting out award charts for AS when you are running two airlines in parallel and can't use them on pre merger VX.

Mergers are an arduous task and taxing on IT services.

James

The problem with Aer Lingus is that I do not believe they have business class past Dublin. How are business class passengers treated on the connection?

@ Nevsky -- That's correct. There have been rumors that they'll add business class intra-Europe, but it hasn't happened yet. If you're connecting same day you should get lounge access, but otherwise not. Onboard the experience is no different.

I want to see the award chart. I fly aer lingus to Dublin. It is cheap using Avios, so I would like to see how many Mileage Plan miles, it will cost.

Another partner that will soon happen with Alaska is with Latam Brasil (former TAM).
Last week LA and JJ integrated their system, so now pretty much all domestic JJ flights are LA (albeit the USA will continue to use JJ). JJ was using Amadeus and LA uses Sabre. So now they are both using Sabre.
If you look at the Latam BR page you can see the earning rates with Alaska Airlines

Until AS updates their website I wouldn't book based on what Latam BR says. Hope they do and soon, looking st some Crazy cheep mixed-cabin RTW itineraries and it would offer more choice.

James

I'm flying Aer Lingus to Dublin on Monday, good timing. They are partners with United too.

Singapore, Finnair, and now Aer Lingus we can all earn on but we still cannot redeem?? This is getting annoying. Using SQ Krisflyer you could practically redeem on AS the day they entered into a partnership. But MileagePlan members are still waiting to redeem on SQ.

As usual, some random thoughts, from a VX die-hard that now has MVP Gold status with AS...

@Lucky, you wrote "Some value has been lost with the Mileage Plan program in recent years, as they’ve cut ties with Delta, Air France-KLM, and Aeromexico, and have scaled back their partnership with American."

Is that really accurate? It seems to me that a) Delta, once they got what they wanted from their DL-AS partnership (a foothold at SEA, among other things), DL decided to make SEA a hub and compete directly with AS; b) whether AS or DL pulled the plug, things had gotten to the point where the two weren't even "frenemies" anymore, and it made sense to sever the relationship; c) DL owns a 49% stake in AeroMexico, so they could certainly pressure AM to cut their ties with AS; d) DL owns a 10% stake in AirFrance/KLM, and since DL is a "hands-on" owner/investor, it's easy to see DL pressuring Flying Blue to cut ties to AS.

As an aside, DL also owns 49% of Virgin Atlantic (VS), and when they acquired their 10% stake in AirFrance/KLM (for €375 million), AirFrance/KLM turned around and bought 31% of VS (for £220 million). See https://onemileatatime.com/delta-air-france-virgin-atlantic-joint-venture/

As for the AS-AA partnership, in your post on July 6, 2017 entitled "Ouch: Alaska & American Are Devaluing Their Partnership As Of January 1, 2018", you wrote, "Now that Alaska has taken over Virgin America, the airlines have more markets in which they overlap and compete. It’s no surprise that American doesn’t want to credit you miles for flying Virgin America between Los Angeles and New York, for example." I would suspect that AA was the one to start this "devaluation" *precisely* because "...American doesn’t want to credit you miles for flying Virgin America between Los Angeles and New York" or other destination served by both AS and AA. MY point is simply that AS had everything to gain by continuing/extending the status quo with AA, while AA had everything to lose.

In other words, I'm not sure that any of these changes in the Mileage Plan program originated with AS.

@ Jason Brandt Lewis -- Check out the next sentence of the same blog post:
"This has a significant impact on the program’s value, though in fairness, it seems like these changes were all prompted by their partners, so they had little control over them."

We're on the same page. 🙂