I’m not sure if other sites covered this and I missed it, but Cathay Pacific’s Asia Miles program is introducing some new rules on April 1st:
- Stopover duration will now be limited to a maximum of 24 hours for Asia Miles Awards and Airline Partners Awards. Please note that all waitlist bookings made before 1 April 2020 are bounded by this change.
- Each member account will have a limit of 10 waitlist bookings at any time. Members who have reached this threshold will need to cancel at least one waitlist booking before creating a new one
Hat tip to Hippo387
Asia Miles also recently had an extremely quiet devaluation of their partner award chart (never picked up by the big travel bloggers) that appears to have happened sometime last year. Business class flights 2,751-5,000 miles went from 50k to 61k miles, first went from 75k to 87k. Change happened without any announcement or warning. Guess this is why Asia Miles doesn’t publish a partner award chart.
Not a smart thing for an airline to do in these conditions.
So basically they are eliminating stopovers. A stopover <24 hrs is a layover.
I’m taking advantage of this with a two-day stopover in Japan… this July. If the trip doesn’t happen then I guess I won’t even be able to repeat the same itinerary on a later date 🙁 Why does this change need to be rolled out during this chaos anyway?
Thanks for the h/t! Huge bummer though as this was one of the big benefits of Asia Miles despite higher-priced award charts.