American AAdvantage has announced a couple of updates today. I’ve already covered how changes are coming to complimentary upgrades on flights within North America, and in this post I’d like to talk about what I consider to be the other biggest announcement, regarding the introduction of cash and miles redemptions. However, as of now, all we can do is speculate…
In this post:
Coming soon: book flights with AAdvantage miles & cash
American has revealed that in the near future, it’ll introduce the ability to book tickets using a combination of cash and miles. Here are all the details we have so far:
Enjoy greater flexibility when planning your next trip. Coming soon, U.S. AAdvantage members can use a combination of cash and miles to book domestic U.S. flights on American (excluding Alaska and Hawaii), with more routes to come.
Will this be a good use of American AAdvantage miles?
All we can do as of now is speculate as to what AAdvantage miles and cash redemptions will look like. However, there’s a precedent here, so let’s talk about that, as I think it’s not too hard to figure out how this will likely play out.
Looking at the “big four” US carriers, Delta SkyMiles, Southwest Rapid Rewards, and United MileagePlus, all already offer some sort of cash and points redemptions. The biggest selling point of these kinds of redemptions is that you can redeem a smaller quantity of points toward the cost of a ticket.
For example, maybe you have 5,000 points in your account, which wouldn’t be enough for a full ticket, but would be enough to get the cost of a ticket reduced.
The catch, not surprisingly, is that the cent per point value on these kinds of redemptions typically isn’t great. After all, the point of these redemptions is to enable people to use their points with ease and minimal effort, rather than to offer the highest cent per point value.
As a general rule of thumb, you’ll get at most one cent per point with these kinds of redemptions, and in some cases, even significantly less value than that.
I think one big question is whether we’ll see this somehow tied to co-branded American AAdvantage cards, whereby this redemption option is either a perk of having a card, or maybe those with a card get an advantageous redemption rate. Anyway, we’ll mark this as “developing” for now.
Bottom line
In the near future, American AAdvantage plans to introduce cash and miles redemptions, giving members a new way to redeem their miles. While exact details remain to be seen, I’d view this more as an easy way to redeem miles, rather than some way to get great value.
This will likely enable members to redeem a small number of miles to get a discount on a ticket, but I wouldn’t expect this to give you over a cent of value per mile.
What do you make of American introducing cash and miles redemptions?
No.
On the plus side this will be really good for people who don't really live in this miles and points space and just want to burn an odd number of miles on a trip they were going to take anyway