American Airlines Quietly Makes Pretty Noticeable Changes To Their Award Chart

This post will likely be short because I’ve been pretty far under the weather the last few days (I love when my kids give me gifts, just not the stomach flu).  It didn’t take long under Doug’s watch for the first award chart changes to come out.

Here’s a link to the new chart.

Here’s a discussion thread on Milepoint.

And, some images of the new chart:

There are a couple of pluses, including the possibility of a 25,000 miles round-trip from the US to the Caribbean.

And, one of my frequently used rewards, US to Europe in Business Class stays at 50,000 miles one-way for MileSaver and 135,000 miles for an AAnytime award one-way with an intermediate level of 110,000 stuck in between (which I can’t imagine I would ever use).

But, lots of bad stuff.  AAnytime coach awards go to 60,000 miles round-trip in the US.

130,000 RT miles for an AAnytime Award from the US to Europe.

With the addition of new tiers (AAnytime Level 1),places like Hawaii are either less (40K one-way) or more (50K one-way) depending on which bucket you find availability in.

From the US to Europe in coach, the bottom three tiers are the same or less than they used to be (20K, 30K, 40K), but the most expensive awards go to 75K now versus 60K one-way before.  And, don’t forget that BA awards will add onerous fuel surcharges.

There are reports that international stopovers and oneworld explorer awards are gone effective immediately.  I haven’t been able to confirm that, but if it is the case that’s hugely punitive as these are two of the less popular but very valuable pieces of the program

I’ll be doing more in-depth comparisons to UA and Delta later, but that’s the scoop for now.

I’m hoping this is a late April Fool’s joke.