How On Earth Did This Happen At The Freddies?!

close-up of a few test tubes

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Most travel awards are utter nonsense – that’s just a fact of life. Even those awards that you’d expect to have an experienced and educated voter pool often turn out some pretty ridiculous results that prove just how meaningless the results are….but I’ve always held the Freddies (the annual loyalty program awards) to a higher standard. While they’re certainly not perfect I’m not used to seeing the Freddies return any stunningly ridiculous results….up until this year.

From 2012  to 2015 the Airline Program of The Year Award (for the Americas) was won by the American Airlines AAdvantage program and the same program has also taken home the Best Elite Program (Airlines in the Americas category) from 2014 (when the category was introduced) through to 2016. None of those wins were much of a surprise as the accolades were mostly well deserved. But that was then.a close up of a logo

In the past the AAdvantage program has offered some of the more generous award charts in the US Airline industry, the top-tier benefits were easily the best out of any US airline (I would argue they were the best in the world), awards weren’t especially hard to come by, upgrades were plentiful and, compared to its peers, AAdvantage was a pretty great program in which to earn miles and status…especially if you traveled a lot.

Unfortunately the past 18 months have seen the AAdvantage program decimated beyond recognition. The number of customer unfriendly updates the program has seen is staggering…here are just a few:

  • The way that miles are awarded for travel has changed to a system that sees most travelers earn considerably fewer miles than they did in the past (I earn 50% – 75% fewer miles on flights I book through American)
  • Not only has AAdvantage significantly reduced the ability to earn miles but it has also increased the cost of awards – a double hit. In the case of partner awards some have increased in cost by over 40%.
  • SAAver Awards on American Airlines (the ones most of us want to book) have gradually become less and less easy to find and we have now reached a point where I can’t see any Business Class SAAver Awards on routes between the US and Europe. None.
  • Where in the past AAdvantage rules allowed travelers to book stopovers when redeeming miles for awards (just like most loyalty programs allow you too) that is no longer the case. Want to book a stopover? Fine….that will mean you have to book two separate awards which, if you can even find availability, can cost you tens of thousands of more miles.
  • AAdvantage has introduced a spend requirement for the purposes of earning Elite status. Now, regardless of how much you fly with the airline, if you don’t his set spend targets you won’t get status with AAdvantage.
  • Where United and Delta exempt their foreign based flyers from having to hit a spend threshold to earn elite status AAdvantage makes no such exemption.
  • Domestic and International upgrades have become considerably harder to snag – I’m struggling to find any dates between now and next April which offer a confirmable upgrade from Economy to Business Class across the Atlantic.
  • Top tier benefits (like international upgrades) have been slashed so, not only are international upgrades harder to find nowadays, even if you can find them you can snag a lot less.

American AirlinesAmerican has some of the best transatlantic Business Class seats….but it’s got a lot harder to upgrade into one

Put simply, AAdvantage has gone from being the best airline loyalty program out there to a very mediocre one…and one that a lot of people I know (or know of) are deserting.

All of that makes it all the more incredible that, in this year’s Freddie Awards, American Airlines AAdvantage won the Best Elite Program in the Americas Airlines category.

Are you kidding me?!

I could have made a pretty compelling argument as to why AAdvantage shouldn’t have won this award in 2016 – but I’ll let that pass on the grounds that most of the pain of the AAdvantage devaluations was yet to be felt – but who on earth is voting for AAdvantage in 2017?

The merits of  loyalty programs are very subjective so it’s not surprising to find that different people can view the same loyalty program in different ways…. but when a loyalty program goes on a slash and burn mission which essentially removes almost all that travelers loved about it, it’s nothing short of mind-blowing to find it winning an award….let alone the “Best Elite Program” award.

Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan

Alaska MileagePlan is probably the last old-fashioned loyalty program which still gives flyers some good mileage redemption opportunities, doesn’t have a minimum spend requirement and doesn’t appear to want to slash every benefit in sight – that’s the program that should have won.

But, fair’s fair, I appreciate that Alaska is very much a West Coast airline so there will be a lot of travelers who don’t get to use MileagePlan or fly Alaska and so can’t in all good faith vote for that loyalty program….but that doesn’t explain why people voted for the one loyalty program that cut the most benefits and devalued the most in the past 18 months.

No one is holding a gun to anyone’s head and forcing them to vote so I can only assume that a large number of Freddies voters genuinely still think that AAdvantage is the best airline loyalty program in the Americas….but how they can think that is beyond me.

One or more of three things appear to be in play here:

  • Blind stupidity
  • Blind ignorance
  • Blind brand loyalty

I have no idea which of those three is the most prevalent but if you voted for AAdvantage in the 2017 Freddies you’re either one of the very small number of people who benefited from some of the changes the program put through or you fall into one or more of the categories above.

So why does this annoy me?

Simple. We as consumers get to tell the airlines what we think of them in two ways:

  1. Voting with our wallets
  2. Not voting for them in awards like these.

If you’re stuck in an American Airlines hub like Dallas it can be quite hard to vote with your wallet as its tough to avoid flying with the airline….but we can all do something about awards like the Freddies.

American Airlines clearly values the Freddies quite highly as each year they go out of their way to ask for our votes……an airplane flying in the sky

….so the Freddies are an excellent opportunity for frequent fliers to let American’s management know just what we think of their cuts to the AAdvantage program. Ultimately management will probably ignore us anyway but at least we can say we sent them a message and you never know…perhaps they may surprise us and do something positive.

But that hasn’t happened. For some unexplainable reason AAdvantage has won the Best Elite Program award again and American’s management can turn around and say “see, we didn’t do any thing wrong with AAdvantage – flyers still love us“. Of course that’s complete and utter nonsense but those who voted for AAdvantage at the Freddies have given them carte blanche to say just that.

Worse yet they’ve also given the airline no reason not to continue cutting benefits and slashing away at AAdvantage some more…which is exactly what I expect the airline to do.

3 COMMENTS

  1. The answer is, to my mind, simple. All of these changes to the AAdvantage program haven’t HURT very many “regular” passengers (i.e.: those who are not professional “road warriors,” or who read travel/points blogs). Once the flying public at large gets hurt, the Freddies will change . . .

    • That’s the thing though…..I was always under the impression that the Freddies were mainly voted on by those who take an active interest in what the loyalty programs are doing. Clearly I must be wrong.

      • Not entirely wrong, but there does seem to be more “regular” passengers voting as the Freddies grow in popularity and overall votes.

        Of course that’s from my very unscientific method of snooping on people who auto-tweeted about voting to Twitter.

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