American Airlines makes business class upgrades harder on many Hawaii and domestic transcon routes

Whenever airline or hotel programs send out end-of-the-week emails that say something to the effect of “Exciting changes are on the way,” you know you’re in trouble.

That’s what happened earlier today, when American Airlines emailed its AAdvantage loyalty program members with the subject line, “See what’s coming for AAdvantage members!” Inside was a link to this page, spelling out dramatic changes to AA’s complimentary upgrade procedures on many of its longest domestic flights.

No more double upgrades to business class on domestic 787s for AA elite members.

As of August 25th, on domestic flights with three cabins (business, premium economy, economy), American will no longer be giving complimentary business class upgrades to elite members with seats in economy. Instead, upgrades will be for one class of service only: from economy to premium economy or from premium economy to business.

After the change, there will only be three ways to be eligible for an upgrade to business class on domestic American flights where a premium economy cabin is offered:

Buy a Premium Economy ticket
Buy an Instant Upgrade to Premium Economy
Use a Systemwide Upgrade Award (SWA) to confirm an upgrade in advance

AA also announced that it would soon start selling cash-and-miles tickets, which will allow you to pay for a flight partially with miles and partially with cash. These will roll out first on domestic flights, with more routes added later. No pricing examples were given and no start date was specified.

Quick Thoughts

To my knowledge, American has domestic premium economy solely on Boeing 777 and 787s and on Airbus A321XLRs. Because of that, there are only nine routes that will be affected by this change:

New York (JFK) to Los Angeles (LAX)
New York (JFK) to San Francisco (SFO)
Boston (BOS) to Los Angeles (LAX)
Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) to Honolulu (HNL)
Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) to Kona (KOA)
Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) to Maui (OGG)
Phoenix (PHX) to Honolulu (HNL)
Chicago (ORD) to Honolulu (HNL)
Chicago (ORD) to Maui (OGG)

While that isn’t a huge list, it certainly encompasses many routes that an elite member would most like to move up front. While this is likely terrible news for high-level elite members on the affected routes, there are a couple of silver linings.

American Airlines Premium Economy (image courtesy of AA)

First, elite members will get free upgrades to premium economy, which in my experience is closer to the first-class domestic recliner seats that most carriers operate within the US than it is to traditional economy. Second, this move will dramatically shorten the novel-length ~~bloodsport~~ upgrade lists on these long domestic flights; elite members booked in premium economy might actually get an upgrade every now and again.

That said, adding premium economy upgrades won’t put many smiles on the faces of the few Executive Platinum and Concierge Key members who did score upgrades on these routes. This will be a major downgrade for them, and I imagine that premium economy will continue to spread to other long-distance routes across North America, so this likely won’t be confined to only nine routes for long.