Did American's Award Pricing Just Get More Dynamic Without Notice?

Have you seen examples in the past of "all standard level awards ... on a given day [being] priced the same [more expensive price] across the board"? I don't necessarily read AA's caveat as constraining themselves that heavily, and indeed it would be kind of odd if they did, since even on super-peak dates there are often less desirable flight times that wouldn't warrant an increased award price. You could read it as saying "on some dates we reserve the right to have higher prices [on some flights]." Which effectively means they could already do dynamic pricing if they wanted.

This has been around for over a year now. And the better the plane, busier the time, the more expensive it is.

You can look at flight 68 from LAX-MIA - it is always more expensive because that flight is operated by the 77W that arrives from SYD every day.

AA has been doing this for a while. They have figured out ways to make their core business travel passengers run away as fast as they can. They will pay for it in the long run as more and more business passengers go to other airlines.

Yes, I was booking a trip yesterday and noticed this happening in Economy as well. Was wondering if I'd missed something in the awards chart.

In your Miami example, I think the reason AA 68 is 52.5K is because it's a 3-cabin flight.

I know there is also an unpublished Level 3, as well as the few "peak" travel dates during the year that will have higher mileage, but I hadn't before noticed variable pricing on the same route on the same date.

I first started noticing this awhile back when trying to book a trip to Israel. I thought maybe it had something to do with the partners involved or the lack of middle east award rates, etc. Kinda weird though. I ended up just buying business tickets from AirFrance as it was super cheap at the time.

This is been going on for a while. They do this on heavy routes. What I have done to avoid this is book saver award on different route or time and as it gets closer see if flight that is popular has empty seats and hope for saver award

Following

What is the data point on whether this more dynamic pricing by flight is a positive or a negative? Would we have only seen low level priced flights appear while others would price at the anytime rate or did they just take flights that were commonly low level and bump them because no one wants to fly at 6 am?

You know, it would make it so much easier for AA's IT department if they just eliminated sAAver awards altogether. Just think of the customer disappointment they'd avoid since the only availability for those awards involves 3 connections and a redeye; and they could certainly fit revenue-generating ads in the 3 extra boxes they'd have.

So glad I'm done with AA. Doug Parker has turned out to be worse than Jeff Smisek.

What's really weird is that this is, for the first time, where American has adopted a crappy Delta move, and didn't wait for United to adopt it first.

The world is a strange place.

Doug Parker ruined AA. Availability is a joke. Worse than SkyPesos.

@Andrew is right, 3 class cabin get a premium if 7,500 points. Why the one is 15,000? Maybe its two flights on 3 class cabins??? Strange however.

Agree. AA miles have become totally worthless/availability and value have deteriorated so markedly over the past year, I'm going to take my business elsewhere.

Lucky, do you still consider yourself an AA fanboy? I see no reason to bank the miles with AA. I'd rather bank it with another oneworld carrier and get Emerald, which I can use the lounges on a US domestic flight. Domestic fcl fares are fairly reasonably priced.

Really just blows how badly the AAdv program has become in the last 2 years-- it's incredible.

Standard Award flights to South America Region 1 went up significantly from North America today. Just noticed this.

Yesterday I booked travel for next July 4 to Europe. 30K miles coach to London and 65K miles coach return from Paris. I felt pretty good getting 4 round trips during high season for less than 100K miles each. Very different from AA award chart.

Hey! I booked an Business Class Award to Caribbean round trip a few weeks ago, one of the award prices was on the chart, one wasn't. I didn't bring it up because I thought it was known/covered haha

what bothers me the most is the fact that they have always given notice (and one is always prepared for when those changes come) but then they don't follow what they have been doing before....

At least with Delta SkyPesos, I know there will always be changes and have low expectations.

This has been going on for some time now.

This has been the case for nearly a year on routes I fly. Ord to sea, clt, Mia, fll, lga. Also basically no saver availability on Thursday, Friday, Sunday or Monday and many Tuesday's.

"Dynamic" = Shittier, right? I used to love AAdv but I'm getting sick of it deval every other week, I'm changing to United, period.

I know this is an old topic, but may need a Revisit. I was looking at flights from prg to smf for a while.

Today Aug 2 showed awards starting at 20k and going up to 109k at small increments, like 1000 miles.

You hit prg to how and the pricing is ridiculous high even tho prg to phl is the same flight for all and phl to yow is a $200 flight