As I’ve already covered, a lot is changing at Alaska Mileage Plan. The program is making elite status easier to earn (including counting award flights toward status), and is also introducing new milestone perks (allowing members to customize their elite perks).
When it comes to redeeming Alaska Mileage Plan miles, there’s a change that’s imminent, though we’ll have to be patient a short while longer…
In this post:
Alaska Mileage Plan plans multi-carrier awards
Alaska Mileage Plan has confirmed that it plans to roll out multi-carrier award redemptions as of this winter. We don’t have any timeline yet beyond that, but presumably it’ll happen somewhere between late 2024 and early 2025.
I’m told that multi-carrier redemptions will initially be available between the United States and Europe, before being expanded to other regions and partners throughout the next year.
Up until now, one quirk of the Mileage Plan program has been that you could only redeem an award ticket for travel on a single partner airline, in addition to Alaska. So it was fine to redeem an award on a combination of Alaska and British Airways, but it wasn’t possible to redeem an award on a combination of American and British Airways, for example.
This has been a major point of frustration for members, given that award availability can be hard to come by, and not being able to mix partners greatly limits some redemption opportunities. We’ve known that this is something that Mileage plan has been working on, but it’s my understanding that the lack of implementation up until this point came down to a technology limitation. Suffice it to say that this will be a major development for the program.
I’m curious to see what redemption rates look like
Mileage Plan overhauled its award pricing as of early 2024, introducing award charts that are a combination of zone and distance based. It remains to be seen how Alaska’s new multi-carrier awards fit into this. Will they follow the current award chart, or will they have an all-new award chart?
I could see it going either way. On the one hand, there’s not necessarily a reason an award should be more costly just due to multiple airlines being involved. On the other hand, I suppose that increases the usefulness of Mileage Plan miles, so perhaps award pricing will reflect that.
For context, below is the current award chart for travel involving Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, as these flights (from the United States) will be the first impacted by these changes.
Keep in mind the other most exciting development when it comes to award flights, which is that as of 2025, they’ll start counting toward elite status with Mileage Plan. When you take an award flight booked with Mileage Plan miles, you’ll earn elite qualifying miles equal to 100% of the distance flown. We’ve never before seen a program do this so generously for partner award flights, so that’s pretty exciting, if you ask me.
Bottom line
Alaska Mileage Plan is promising that multi-carrier awards will become available as of this winter, in the coming months. With this, it’ll be possible to redeem Mileage Plan miles for travel on multiple partner airlines on the same itinerary. This will initially be available on transatlantic flights, and will then be expanded to more routes over the coming year.
I’m excited to see this new award option introduced, especially in conjunction with earning elite miles for award flights.
What do you make of Mileage Plan introducing multi-carrier awards?
Tough to find awards. Also the last to open award calendar compared to say flyingblue
I got excited for a second and thought Alaska was going to offer RTWs the way Cathay does multi-carrier awards.
But this is technically a first step. It would be huge for Alaska to offer this.
All this is going in a better direction for the alaska air award traveler, I'd say as the dynamic pricing has raised ticket cost 50% at a minimum and 400% most cases as was 50,000 to Asia on cathay its now 85 but never available up to 250k and my biggest complaint is that all the foriegn partners get 30 days of booking access for bookings 360 days out over us alaska mileage users 330 days out which is grossly unfair
It's actually a US airline thing, all airlines Delta, UA, AA, B6, Alaska all have the shorter booking windows, it's rather unfortunate
They need to waive the partner award booking fee of $12.50 for MVPG 100k, fix their broken award upgrade processor, and have more premium awards available. None of these “enhancements” are things that would make me keep my business with them.
Unless there is any award availability released to AS, then this is lipstick on a pig. One can only hope that more awards are made available, though availability (or lack thereof) isn't always going to be AS's decision, as partners seem to be making awards less plentiful as well.
Nowhere is this as evident as trying to get award redemptions across the Pacific...especially in J!