Is This Evidence That American Went Too Far When Gutting AAdvantage?

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It’s not really a secret that the new(ish) leadership team at American Airlines has been systematically cutting benefits, devaluing the AAdvantage program and generally introducing a series of customer-unfriendly changes to services and aircraft…but are we now starting to see signs that management went too far?

American Airlines has long allowed travelers to pay to take part in “status challenges” which give them a fast track to AAdvantage status and it has also been known to email out offers of challenges which you don’t have to pay for too….but something slightly different is happening right now.

The Latest Offering From AAdvantage

This thread on Flyertalk and One Mile At A Time reported over the weekend that American Airlines has been emailing out considerably more generous status matches and challenges than we’ve seen in some time.

These are some of the challenges and status offers that are being sent out and, notably, they appear to be being sent to flyers who haven’t flown with American much (or at all) in the past year.

Fly on American or other eligible airlines* and earn the following required Elite Qualifying Miles (EQMs) and Elite Qualifying Dollars (EQDs) between the date you register and May 25, 2018, and you’ll receive that status through January 31, 2019.

Note: Only flyers who have received an email from American Airlines are eligible to participate in the challenge outlined above.

As well as sending out offers of challenges to people, American is also apparently straight-out giving away status to former customers…presumably in the hope of winning them back.

The statuses being handed out appear to be Gold, Platinum and Platinum Pro and here are a few examples of what people have been receiving:

zrs70 from Flyertalk was sent this:

Platinum status –on us. Enjoy free status through May 25 You’ve been selected to receive free American Airlines AAdvantage® Platinum status through May 25, 2018. You’ll experience all the benefits of Platinum status. Plus, we’ll give you twenty 500-mile upgrades just for registering — no strings attached. Sign up before you travel and no later than February 1, 2018.

Numerous other contributors to Flyertalk have mentioned that they received the same offer but for PlatinumPro.

Mehdron from Flyertalk was sent “10 500-mile upgrades and Gold status through May 25”

This is what you normally need to earn (in a year) to reach AAdvantage status

Thoughts

The thing that stands out most in all of this is that some flyers are being offered the chance to earn top-tier Executive Platinum status for a lot less effort than it would normally require – Executive Platinum status is not normally achievable via a challenge.

Flying 35,000 Elite Qualifying Miles and earning $4,000 Elite Qualifying Dollars by 25 May 2018 isn’t all that tough (you’d get almost all of the way if you booked one of the Europe – Australia Business Class fares I wrote about earlier today) so what’s American up to?

There’s a good chance that American has gone too far with its cuts to the AAdvantage program and it may well be seeing lower numbers of elite flyers on its books than it expected (and wants).

2017 was the first full year of travel and elite status qualification after the major gutting of AAdvantage back in June 2016 so American is now starting to see the results of the changes it pushed though. With AAdvantage now a shadow of its former self it’s no longer good enough to be a primary reason to stick with American Airlines.

Halving the number of Systemwide Upgrades to 4 was just one of the major devaluations to AAdvantage

In the past flyers may have chosen to go out of their way to fly American just because of the benefits that came with AAdvantage status. With most (if not all) of those benefits now in the dim and distant past it’s possible that those same flyers are now choosing more convenient ways to get to their destinations and not flying with American anymore…..and it’s possible that American underestimated how may flyers it would lose this way.

If that’s what’s happening then American may be in for a rude awakening at the end of this year. 

If 2017 was the first full year of travel after AAdvantage was gutted then 2018 will be the first full year after the airline introduced Basic Economy fares, showed us that it would love to introduce seats with just 29″ of pitch, changed the way upgrades work and gave us reason to believe that Systemwide upgrades will soon be worth a lot less than they are now.

If AAdvantage elite numbers don’t drop further in 2018 I’ll be very surprised.

This is what my AAdvantage numbers will look like for quite some time!

Bottom Line

I’d like to believe that American is seeing significant drops in elite numbers across the board but I have no evidence to prove that at this point.

I can only speculate on why American is churning out some very tempting status challenges at this point in the year but, considering how close we still are to the end of the last qualification year (and American’s hierarchy getting the final 2017 status numbers), it’s very possible that they’ve been given a nasty surprise.

Speaking as someone who will not be earning any type of AAdvantage status this year (I have lifetime Platinum status) I’ll be interested to see if I get offered anything like this at the beginning of 2019. If I’m right about people continuing to abandon American Airlines in 2018 I think I probably will 🙂