Emirates Skywards seems to have just devalued miles without any advance notice. Business class award costs have definitely gone up, and I’m trying to piece together if there were any other price increases.
Continue reading: Emirates Skywards Devalues, Raises Award Costs
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If the miles for First Class are still the same, that's actually a good thing, because upgrades from Business into First should be now cheaper, because the difference should be smaller.
No wonder, they had a very generous promotion until yesterday where you could generate miles cheaply. I'm talking about 450$ for oneway First Class to Dubai.
One of the bloggers from the country that is currently seen as a big threat by the US spread it too much and too many people took advantage of it.
For weeks, my partner and I had been eying one way JFK-MXP award tickets in Business for late August (we have to attend a wedding in Italy then). I had been monitoring award prices for a handful of dates in late August, and on all dates, Emirates had 2+ tickets at the 62.5K award price.
Fast forward to last night (Jan 31st at ~6:30 pm ET, we are based in NYC), I checked again and confirmed tickets were 62.5K on any of the dates we could depart, and a just couple hours later at ~8:30 pm ET, we were ready to book. We transferred the 62.5K miles from each of our Chase accounts to Skywards and went to book and suddenly noticed all tickets across all dates were 72.5K! Luckily we each had the extra 10K points to transfer over and nab our seats, but we really thought there was a system glitch. So I can confirm the change took place somewhere between 6:30 pm and 8:30 pm ET.
I am so glad to see this article and know we aren’t crazy!!! I am a huge avgeek and know my way around almost any airline or points program, and I have never seen this happen so abruptly (from transferring points to booking). When I say our jaws dropped! I am so disappointed by it.
I just checked JFK-DXB J, saver stays the same at ~72k each leg for a round trip while flex went from ~100k to ~115k. Economy OTOH stays the same at ~36k saver/62k flex (IMO economy awards not a great value). No big loss if J saver availability remains decent.
Round trip for SFO-BOM-SFO in J has also gone up from 235k to 272.5k. I wanted to get 4 Tix round trip but now it's way higher than my planned budget!
Wow, I just redeemed for two R/T business class SFO DXB on Saturday. Good timing.
I have a multi-city business class award booking on Emirates:
West Coast -> India
Middle East -> West Coast
I had booked it for 241,250 Miles + USD 508.67. The itinerary now costs 278,750 Miles + USD 508.67. That is an increase of 15.5%.
It's over anyway so it doesn't matter anymore. But there were several people who massively gained skywards miles during this promo.
Lucky - Could it be that this 'devaluation' (or repricing) of J Business awards is to facilitate or better align award pricing structure for the new Emirates Premium Economy W Class redemptions?
Historically once you book any air or hotel award it is valid even if subsequent similar such awards cost more. Of course if you make a change or cancel and try to rebook you will be hit with a higher cost in miles
I wonder if this is why Emirates has all First Class NYC/Dubai blocked for the rest of the year. I have been trying for weeks now to change dates on flights I have booked for this week. I finally just had to cancel flights today and leave tickets open. Very strange. Nothing to fly to Dubai in August?!
I couldn’t get first class from NYC (which I assumed covered both zJFK and Newark) but once I put in EWR, I was able to book it.
I couldn’t get first class from NYC (which I assumed covered both JFK and Newark) but once I put in EWR, I was able to book it.
Well, this pushed me to go ahead and book my trip. Flying DXB to VIE in First on the A380 in early April. Hopefully the onboard bar will be opened back up by then!
they will continue to devalue since no blogger wrote when it all started when they changed partner award charts from region based to senseless distance based charts
Sorry to hear this way and not by the airline itsef. Used to love Emirates but they hv developed into too unreliable & easy to cancel/change
They cut and devalue,what else can we expect because even their flagship lounges are mostly closed
All of a sudden I am informed that I will lose miles this month. Don't know why because I have not been able to travel for 2 years and then when I did they cancelled my return flight leaving me stranded. Not a good airline any more. They couldn't have cared less about me being stranded. What happened to the good old days when if the airline cancelled the flight they would phone other airlines and get you back home. Not a chance with these and the staff member was so arrogant that I was left with my mouth hanging open
Had some similar experience some years back, have not travelled on Emirates since then. There are many at least equal other options
Ben- regarding your comment "though this would mean upgrade costs from business class to first class are potentially decreasing, since the difference is now smaller)."
I actually don't think the upgrade costs are decreasing to reflect the smaller difference between first and business. I just looked at the EWR-ATH and JFK-MXP, and both upgrade costs still reflect 30K to upgrade from J to F. As such, if you now book a J ticket to ATH at 72.5K, you will still pay 30K to upgrade, and thus the total cost is now 102.5K vs 92.5k previously). So your previous trick to upgrade the flight is now no longer as good of a deal since before it was only a 7.5K difference between booking first outright (85k) vs now its a 17.5K.
Why does Emirates have such terrible redemption rates? Ugh...