I’ve written in the past about US Airways’ off-peak awards to Europe, which are one of the best values in the airline industry. For travel in the off season, a US to Europe award costs just 35,000 miles in coach or 60,000 miles in business class. Beyond that, if you have the US Airways Mastercard you get a further 5,000 mile discount, making roundtrip business class to Europe just 55,000 miles. Now, the dates are limited (January 15-February 28), but if you could take advantage of it, it’s an unbeatable value, especially since US Airways has fully flat Envoy Suites on many of their transatlantic routes.
Well, it seems that US Airways has eliminated this award in business class:
I’m not sure whether it’s worse that they didn’t provide any advance notice, or the fact that when they made the change they didn’t make any sort of an announcement, but rather just quietly updated the award chart.
There are some other minor adjustments to the award chart (three cabin first class to Hawaii going from 70,000 miles to 80,000 miles, Alaska being split out as a separate destination with different pricing at the “medium” and “high” level, etc.)
So this is truly puzzling to me, and believe it or not, I actually think maybe we’re supposed to be happy about this. I’ve been expecting a massive devaluation of the US Airways award chart for a while (in particular the 90,000 mile business class award between the US to North Asia), so if these changes were made, does that mean everything else is spared for now? If so, this might just be good news. Or is this just the start of more that’s on the way?
Typically during mergers devaluing the award chart isn’t at the top of their list of things to do, so maybe this is it… for now?
(Tip of the hat to The Wandering Aramean)
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