Mary asked: I’ve got 75,000 miles with American. Now that American has filed for chapter 11 what should I do with my miles? Are they decreasing in value?
Peter replied: Mary, your miles have been decreasing in value before they went under bankruptcy protection and this is true for all the airlines. Use your miles is now if you can. Remember airlines are now flying at 82 percent load factor, which means that there’s very little incentive for the airlines to redeem miles and potentially displace a revenue passenger. It’s now very difficult to redeem your miles. And 17.3 trillion unredeemed miles are out there and may never be redeemed because the airlines make it too hard.
Many people ask me: should I just use my miles for upgrades? You’ve already paid a lot of money for the ticket so an upgrade is the most inefficient use of your miles. Bottom line here is to be creative, think of alternate cities and alternate routes and you have a decent chance of redeeming your miles.
For more information on miles read “Tactics for Redeeming Frequent Flier Miles” and “Travel Trends: Value of Frequent-Flier Miles Falling“.
Roy in Sarasota, Florida asked: I was recently booked on a flight from Fort Lauderdale to the Caribbean. The airlines just canceled the flight and told me they would fly me instead from Miami to the Caribbean but we made our arrangements to go to Fort Lauderdale to catch the flight. Who’s responsible for the cab ride we now have to take from Fort Lauderdale to Miami because we can’t change our travel plans?
You’re not going to like my answer, Roy. The airline is within their rights to get you where you need to go by providing an alternate means of transportation. However, they did cancel a route that they advertised and they’re going to fly you from Miami to the Caribbean without a ticket change fee and without a penalty so that’s the good news. You should go up the line of command and talk to the supervisor and see if they’ll give you a ground transportation voucher which they will do in certain cases because your flight essentially got interrupted―the technical term. The airlines are not required to do that and they can change a flight at any time. The bottom line is it’s not fair. You operated on good faith and you didn’t get what you deserved.
For more information on today travel rules, check out “The DOTS New Air Travel Rules Explained.”
