A bit over a month ago I wrote about how American was realigning their fare codes for first class on domestic flights. With this recent adjustment we saw the following changes: -- The “F” booking class (full fare first class) changed to the “J” booking class -- The “A” booking class (discounted and upgraded first…
Continue reading: Is It Now Worth Redeeming Avios For American First Class?
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
You briefly touched on it at the end, but for me the biggest problem now - whether redeeming via BA or AA miles is the near impossibility of finding saver award seats. When they ARE available, it's often a very inconvenient routing, such as double connections or very long layovers.
AA seriously needs to open up award space.
This is such an insult to the AAdvantage program members.
Anyone still collecting and obsessing over miles is living in the past.
The latest fad is marbles.
If travelling with hold luggage it is also worth taking in to account that first class includes a hold bag whereas economy doesn't.
We needed to pay for a bag last year at Orlando as we had booked with Avios and the staff were mighty confused as the check in machine had not given us any option to do this. There was a lot of humphing and sighing as they had to process the payment .....
Not good news at all from a tier point standpoint. One was getting 60 tier points for every flight. That is greatly reduced now. Lousy
@Ruth Grint if you used one of your Citi AA CC to pay the tax your bag would have been free.
I am British. Our credit cards come with far fewer perks I.e. none ! I have the BA Amex which earns me Avios but no other perks
I think this is big for last minute flights too. With BA not charging a close in booking fee it opens up a lot more options to book a flight right before you fly (if there is a lot of domestic first inventory) without having to spend an arm and a leg to do so.
Also great for Hawaii flights from the west coast
Another way to look at it is a RT first class ticket under 1150 miles is only 30K avios, compared to the industry benchmark 25K miles for economy roundtrip.
And as always a big upside to avios is the $5.60 cancellation/redeposit fee.
Being in the middle of the country (Texas) I'm pretty indifferent to domestic first class. At least on UA, premium economy works just fine for flights of less than 4 hours (which are what we use domestic for... to get to either coast). I don't need the domestics crappy food or slightly bigger seats, and if I want to drink, I'll visit the lounge before the flight.