American Airlines Award Changes For 2019 (Canada Cheaper, Premium Hawaii More Expensive)

American Airlines is making some changes to award pricing, these changes will go into effect for travel booked on or after January 16th, 2019 (tickets booked before this date for travel after this date are not affected). Changes are as follows:

  • Canada will region part of the Contiguous 48 U.S. states region award levels. This will cause pricing to either drop or remain the same, depending on where you’re traveling to/from.
  • Miles required for travel to/from Hawaii in premium cabins will increase for most regions. These increases are quite large, see both award charts below:

View Comments (29)

  • So us to Europe business class is not changing it will still be 115,000 round trip with saver

  • I can try and explain the Hawaii to/from US changes further because I've been eyeing a redemption.

    The chart above is only showing MilesAAver awards on AA metal, from Hawaii. The biggest change there is that business/first is going from 40k to 55k. It doesn't show the AAnytime changes, fortunately level 1 is staying at 67.5k.

    However, what isn't mentioned here at all (and I think is the most damaging change), is that flights with lie-flat seats are getting an additional increase tacked on:

    **If the award includes travel on an aircraft that offers lie-flat seats, the MileSAAver Levels will be 7,500 miles higher; AAnytime Levels will be 20,000 miles higher than what is shown.

    The full changes with this text can be seen here: https://www.aa.com/i18n/aadvantage-program/miles/redeem/award-travel/flight-award-chart.jsp

    I know a lot of people typically booked the AAnytime rate, to get lie-flat to Hawaii since there was rarely saver space available and it wasn't a horrible deal. That just got a lot more expensive at 87.5k.

    • This is not good for me. I am planning a trip for my family and parents this year, and was all set to make an AAnytime redemption in a couple of months for all 6 of us. Now it will cost an additional 120,000 points.

      • Same here. I'm going to get some of my family booked now that is ready and figure the rest out later I guess.

    • this is why citi and AA are fucking genius.

      1) set up grAAvy train trap
      2) gamers think they are so damn cool having 5MM AA miles in their tank
      3) AA imposes rapid inflation making Zimbabwe look like an idiot
      4) gamers now look at their 100+ AA plat cards as paper weight but now need to wait 2 years to app any other bank because all other banks now follow chase 5/24 on their cards...

      • I don't know. You could say this was overdue, and honestly this cost is now more in line with other carriers. It still sucks of course.

    • Jason's link is correct. I have a flight to Europe paid with points coming up soon and the chart at the top is certainly not the points I used.

    • The article is not clickbait. I'm sure lots of people are considering redemptions to/from Hawaii.

    • How is this clickbait? We are open to constructive criticism but I literally have no idea how this article could be improved based on your comment.

  • Yea something isn’t right on those photos. Hawaii doesn’t change. Are we missing a vertical column?

    • That's the award chart from Hawaii. I thought it made sense to list that considering it's the only part of the award chart actually changing.