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American Airlines has a far better award chart than rivals United and Delta, especially in premium cabins.
Unfortunately on many of its own internationally configured planes, American Airlines has angled lie flat seats in business class instead of fully flat beds. It greatly lags its rivals there.
American’s newest plane, the 777-300ER has fully flat beds in business class, and now American is refurbishing its 777-200 and 767-300 planes with flat beds.
Fully flat beds are a huge step up from angled lie flat beds in terms of sleep quality, which I think is one of the most important reasons that the premium for a business class award is worth paying on international awards.
Let’s look at the newest routes American Airlines is flying with flat beds and the award space picture.
American’s old 777-200s are seeing a refresh in their premium cabins. Gone will be 16 First Class beds and 37 Business Class angled lie flats and in their place, we’ll see 45 fully flat Business Class beds (and no First Class).
The first route to see the new configuration will be Dallas <-> Santiago, Chile beginning June 12, 2014.
To check if the date you’re looking at has the new fully flat business class, look for this seat map.
If you can string together MileSAAver award seats in both directions, you’ll pay only 100k American Airlines miles plus $50 roundtrip. (The miles price doesn’t go up even if you add connecting flights to Dallas.)
Unfortunately award space is bleak in business class. I searched for one seat in business class at the MileSAAver price from June 12, 2014 on and found only a smattering of award space on the outbound. The good news is that the days correspond to the South American Spring and Summer.
The return has a little more award space, but again, not very much.
The refreshed 767-300 starts service from New York-JFK to Zurich, Switzerland on April 1, 2014.
This is its seating chart:
A round trip business class award at the MileSAAver level is again 100k American Airlines miles, but unfortunately the next MileSAAver space is in December.
Recap
The good news is that American Airlines is upgrading its business class offering, while simultaneously having a much cheaper award chart than its rivals.
The bad news is that there is almost no award space on the upgraded routes.
Those facts may be connected.
Have you found a good deal in miles on a top notch business class product lately? Did the route have good award space?
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Best guess when it’s available on DFW-ICN?
Not sure. I’d love to get some more information on what routes when.
Jason, you might want to go take a look at other routes that AA has with the new biz seats. You will find that that there’s virtually zero availability at the saver level, ever. The bloggers don’t like to tell you this, but it’s the truth: getting AA’s new business class seats at the saver level is no longer possible. Go try looking for a couple of new business seats on any route – you won’t find 2 no matter what day you look. That’s the sneaky AA devaluation that nobody’s talking about. Unfortunately, if you want to enjoy the new AA business seats, you are not going to get them at the saver level – ever. Go ahead – look, you’ll see.
You keep over stating the case. There are a few days, but you’re generally right that this is a stealth devaluation.
But I don’t think this is permanent. I think this is a temporary “protection” of the new product. United didn’t release any 787 biz for a while, but now they release some.
You say it’s “overstating the case”. Fine. I say that’s the reality that we now have to deal with.
Of course, I don’t have a financial incentive to encourage people to run out and sign up for all the credit cards they can. I’ll be able to pay all my bills if nobody signs up for a new credit card today. Others can judge whether your or my assessment just might be a teeny bit colored by how each of us stands to gain from our position. ‘Nuff said there.
We can all hope that things get better, but I don’t think that’s realistic. I’ve been playing this game for 20 years, and with my perspective, it seems like obvious wishful thinking to expect MORE award seats to be released going forward. That’s not how this works. Especially when the credit cared issuers flood the market with billions of miles (as they have been doing heavily for an extended time), and greatly reducing or outright eliminating the number of seats they make available, it doesn’t take a PHD to figure out everybody with a box of scratched Vanilla Reloads is not going to be enjoying a bowl of warm nuts up front on an AA flight to London.
You say that you think this is just a temporary thing. I disagree, but would love to be proved wrong. Personally, I’m eyeing a flight to LHR in the summer of 2015 (yes, 2015), and have reluctantly concluded that my half-a-million AA miles are all but worthless for that, so I’m now looking at other programs that actually release award seats. We will see who was right, but I do not expect to see the inside of an AA business class cabin anytime soon (except in photos on bloggers’ posts encouraging yet more suckers to sign up for the latest credit card bait-and-switch).
@Bruhaha – agree that the availability on AA metal for international premium cabin awards is dismal, especially to europe and on their new 777 product. However, the main alternative to europe within one world is BA, which does have decent premium cabin award availability; however, you’re looking at 50k miles + $500 in taxes. You can still redeem on AA metal at the AAnytime level of 100k miles + only $2 in taxes. The availability of the AAnytime awarda are wide open on pretty much all AA routes. If you have the one of the Citi AAdvantage cards you also get 10K rebated back to your account, so the net cost is 90K miles and $2 in taxes. Not that bad of deal overall in light of other recent airline devaluations, especially considering — 1.) the negligible taxes of only $2 2.) the wide open award availability at the AAnytime level 3.) the ability to add a stopover to each one-way awards (HNL – LAX (stopover) – LHR) which effectively increases the value proposition of the redemption. The fact that the award availability is so wide open at this level is really the clinching factor. Just choice a date and you’re pretty much guaranteed to find an award seat available… Granted, it would be better to see some additional saver award availability added. However, given the choice between an award chart devaluation (with resulting slight increase in saver availability) or keeping things the way they are — my vote would be to maintain the status quo. AA miles have become much easier to acquire over the past few years through Citi credit card promos of 50k-100K per card (many which were previously churnable), bank direct accounts, fidelity investment promos, etc…
This is an interesting perspective. I do think there are times when it can make sense to book awards at the “Standard” price.