Brutal Etihad Guest Award Change & Cancellation Fees Updated AGAIN!

Actually, Etihad’s inflexible policy can be advantageous.

In case you are 100% sure you want to take a flight except if you get sick.

Then some travel insurances might need to reimburse you for the award. It might be the cash price on the high end or if possible the purchase cost for the miles.

What are the fare rules for redeeming on partners? They certainly aren't easy to find on their website...

I almost always book my award travel with United because they don't charge to cancel or change the flight.

The change fee of 200AED outside of 72 hours at least gives you a method of retaining your miles on a higher mileage award. Beyond this I have to agree that Etihad award change and cancellation policies are a tough pill to swallow. I never use the program. To fly through the Middle East, Qatar is the sweet spot today.

… and don’t forget about their crazy baggage charges on award tickets!

I almost redeemed some miles for an intra Middle East - it didn’t include luggage and I couldn’t find information about the cost, but assumed it will be something in the $50-$100 range.

Then I came across all the stories on FlyerTalk of people learning at the airport luggage fees go in high hundreds or thousands of dollars…

Loyalty programs are quickly becoming irrelevant for driving behavior. They've gutted programs so much that loyalty is a meaningless factor. Not nearly as bad as hotel programs, but a shadow of what they used to be.

Well, it makes every step towards a sky team partner lol

Which is a particularly moronic statement, seeing as it's lost multiple Skyteam-aligned partners in just the past 2 years.

TBH...the gaming of points, blogger posts as to such, and speculative bookings are driving these choices by EY.

It's only a matter of time before they all start doing this to curtail the booking of seats as a speculative hold until something else better becomes available. How many times have you booked a J itinerary a few months in advance and canceled it the second an F became available two days before? As one example. I'm not judging, I do it all the time. The end result is that you are less likely to do that if you have severe penalties.

The 72 Hour rule fits directly into this scenario as it's exactly when a number of seats at lower redemption rates appear on other airlines. They are just gaming back the gamers.

That in turn opens up J for people who want it. Is that such a bad thing? Airlines put placeholder schedules and change them closer to departure, do they give us 25% back when that happens?

Gaming the gamers, for sure. It's a bit rich holding onto a redemption for weeks, knowing all the while that you're probably going to cancel it the day before departure. This is an attempt to level the playing field and make the program fairer for members who don't have 1M points sitting around to book a whole mess of tickets months in advance. The players have played themselves into this one, and I'll wager EY won't be the only airline who tightens their program like this.

@Points Adventure. I actually am agreeing. I would rather have a sane system rather than this constant gaming. It costs time and lack of genuine award space you want. I give EY accolades for having the courage to fight back and level the field.

Honestly hope all airlines up their fees and cancellation policy. Too many Karen's and Darren's booking 10 flights just to "hold" them in case

Also forgot to mention I emailed this article to AA discussing the gaming of their cancellable partner award space. Found a few exec loyalty folks on LinkedIn. Hopefully they see the value in introducing steep cancellation charges.

Come to think of it. Need to send this to Alaska too

More details or examples needed? Thousand dollar luggage charges? Yikes

Just in Time for the 50% extra miles when purchasing miles. what a SCAM! By the way the Luggage stories are very True. If you "know" the Indians working at the AUD Airport, you can slide even after your Luggage is over 20KG, But if they are not "Friends" of yours, they will make you pay extra for .5 kg that is over weight. I went through this personally.

Honestly, I would appreciate is US carriers (and others globally) had some incremental aspect of this kind of cancellation policy. I'm tired of fighting to find award space that people just sit on speculatively until the day of departure, only to let it go to waste. The booking policy is far too lenient for how many miles are out there now, and people who have tools to exploit it.

As far as I'm concerned, Etihad is Middle East's low-cost airline. I fly them because they can get me from Europe to Asia and back for 2000€ in J. At that price I don't expect anything other than a flat bed seat and somewhat decent food (that's why I'm willing to suffer through their terrible schedule which forces me to do morning arrivals in Asia). The state of their FFP more or less reflects it, it would be a wasted of money for airline that primarily competes on price.

I credit their the flights to Flying Blue instead. There are some sweet spots there since FB failed to update the earning chart for EY for quite a while 🙂

All of this makes sense but what doesn't is the fact that these restrictions don't apply to partner awards. The speculative bookings are mostly held by those users. Its as-if the airline decided to hurt their own loyalty program the most.

@Jo Or protect their own seat management of seats. With that they could care less about partners. They are just looking to have better control over speculative bookings internally on their own metal.

Ah, I understand….partners the other way. That is a good point.

Where did you get the information about partner award change and cancellation policies?

When I searched for an award on American Airlines within the US, both the economy and business options showed the same changes and cancellation policies, which were Etihad's new "Value" policy.

I also called Etihad Guest about an American Airlines flight I was considering that isn't searchable on Etihad's website (as is the case with many flights to or from smaller US airports), and the agent told me that my economy flight was non-refundable and had a 600 AED change fee for changes made at least 72 before flight departure. When I followed up to ask if all partner flights (regardless of airline or class of service) followed this policy, he said that they did. There was some language barrier with this agent, and I didn't feel that he was too knowledgeable about partner awards, so I'm not convinced he knew the policy for other partner award flights but assume he gave the correct information for the specific AA flight he checked for me.